Wildfire Conditions & Risk Map for Water Utilities

This story map provides information on current, past and potential future wildfire conditions in the United States for water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities to assess the potential for wildfire near their facilities or within their watersheds. Using these maps and links to data resources, utilities can improve their understanding of wildfire in their area, which helps them maintain and deliver adequate, reliable, and sustainable water supplies and clean water services.  EPA's Creating Resilient Water Utilities Initiative  provides additional resources to strengthen utility resilience to wildfire threats.

As you progress through this story, consider how fire could impact your system and community:

  • Could current drought conditions change the potential for fires?
  • How high is the risk to my community?
  • How can this knowledge be applied to planning over the long term?

Current Wildfire Extent & Status

Start by reviewing this map of current wildfires, updated every 15 minutes, and current drought conditions, updated weekly. Information on current fires is critical to protecting and managing water resources and infrastructure in fire-prone regions. Drought impacts the landscape, changing the potential for wildfires and the quantity of water available for water utilities. Monitoring fire threats enables water utilities to activate operational changes to protect their facilities or alter treatment in response to potential changes in source water quality.

Wildfire Trends

Impacts from past wildfire events and trends in the frequency and severity of events are instructive to nearby utilities, indicating how similar future events may impair water resources, infrastructure, and operations. Accounting for these trends can inform wildfire mitigation strategies to limit losses during future events. Using the Wildfire Trend Explorer below, review the locations and time series of wildfire events. In many parts of the United States, trends in event frequency are evident and can be used when considering actions to limit consequences from future wildfires.

Wildfire Risk

Finally, the factors that can increase a community’s risk to wildfires, including frequency of drought, vegetation, topography, and zoning regulations, determine the potential for wildfire hazard. Hazard potential quantifies the vulnerability of landscapes to events that may be difficult to control. The map below shows this important indicator of wildfire risk for consideration in risk assessments for water utility infrastructure and watersheds.

CRWU Wildfire Conditions and Risk Web Map

Adapting to Reduce Wildfire Impacts

Scroll through the case studies below to learn more about how utilities have begun planning for and adapting to potential changes in future wildfire conditions.

City of Bend, Oregon

The City of Bend is located in the Cascade Mountain Range and the high desert of central Oregon. Bend provides drinking water and wastewater services to approximately 68,000 people and it serves an average demand of 14 million gallons per day. Increased instances of forest fires and drought, coinciding with decreased precipitation and snowpack, threaten the City’s water quality and supply. The potential for water quality degradation is exacerbated under a future climate that is hotter, drier, and has lower river flows. In response to this potential scenario, Bend has already implemented several resilience strategies to augment water supplies, conduct community outreach, and develop emergency water supply plans. Furthermore, they used the Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT) to evaluate additional adaptation strategies to help face their current and anticipated challenges: adding more wells; implementing a grey water system; increasing storage; and modernizing their diversion.

Fort Collins Utilities, Colorado

Fort Collins Utilities (FCU) provides drinking water and wastewater services to approximately 131,000 residential customers and various large water users in Fort Collins, Colorado. FCU also sells excess raw water to large agricultural users. FCU is served by two main surface water sources: the Cache la Poudre River and Horsetooth Reservoir. FCU is especially concerned about water quality issues caused by flooding, particularly flash flooding on burned landscapes following wildfires.

City of Bozeman, Montana

The City of Bozeman, Montana provides drinking water services to residential customers utilizing snowpack melt captured in the Sourdough and Hyalite watersheds. The City of Bozeman is concerned that future droughts will impact management, quality and allocation of their water resources. In particular, wildfire in the Sourdough and Hyalite watersheds has the potential to negatively affect water quality due to erosion that can increase turbidity, sedimentation and metal concentrations.

Additional Resources

Beyond the immediate threat of wildfire damage to your facilities and watersheds, fire can generate public health risks associated with smoke and exposure to degraded air quality. Use  EPA’s AirNow  to get updates and alerts when wildfire and air quality conditions change in your region.

While models projecting the changes in future drought and wildfire conditions are being improved, we can still look to recent trends in wildfire events for insight into what may be experienced in the future. In many Western U.S. basins, the frequency of large wildfires has been increasing since the 1980s, and indicators of both near-term changes and trends in drought and wildfire potential can be reviewed on  EPA’s Climate Indicator Map Viewer . As outputs from models of future wildfire potential become available and published as part of the  Fifth National Climate Assessment , those data will be added to this story.

After reviewing the potential for wildfires in your area, you can access more information on how to protect your water utility and community from wildfires in our resources below: