Fire Safety
Enjoying recreational campfires on your own property is a wonderful benefit of the Fishhawk Lake Reserve and Community. Our rural, forested location is at high risk from uncontrolled fire during the dry season and our community is supported by the small, mostly-volunteer Mist-Birkenfeld Fire Department. Fire safety awareness and wildfire prevention and preparedness are essential for everyone who enjoys our community. FLRC's Firewise and Fire Safety Committee is charted by the Board of Directors to minimize the risk posed by uncontrolled fire to our community and administers FLRC’s participation in the national Firewise USA fire prevention program.
Safe Operation and Maintenance of Fires and Fit Pits
Here are five essential things you need to know about enjoying a safe campfire at Fishhawk Lake:
- Fire pits may only be used for recreational campfires. Yard debris (and only yard debris) goes in the Community's Burn Pile.
- FLRC volunteers inspect fire pits annually. You don't need a permit from the Fire Department.
- Remove debris from around your fire pit before lighting a fire: 5 feet around, 1 foot down, 20 feet up.
- All fire pit owners must be trained by FLRC volunteers in fundamental fire safety. A trained household member must always be in view of a campfire.
- Keep a water hose or a 5-gallon bucket of water near all campfires. Drench your fire when you're done and stir up the "soup" with a shovel.
Check out the FLRC Fire and Fire Pit Guidelines for more details about campfire safety, annual inspection requirements, and fire safety training.
Interested in the history of FLRC's involvement the pioneering partnership that allows regulated campfires in residential communities? Check out the 2004 report from the Mist-Birkenfeld Fire Department.
Firewise USA
The Firewise USA program teaches people how to adapt to living with wildfire and is a project of the National Fire Protection Association. Information on the Firewise website addresses landscape design, plant selection, plant grouping and location, and irrigation systems. Firewise communities in Oregon are represented as a data layer in the Oregon Wildfire Risk Explorer basic map viewer.
Visit the Firewise website for more information about this national program or Watch this important safety video from the National Fire Prevention Association.
FLRC annually renews its membership in Firewise USA. You can find our 2023 renewal application here. In 2023, the FLRC Firewise and Fire Safety Committee also partnered with the Oregon Department of Forestry and the Mist-Birkenfeld Fire Department to update FLRC's Firewise USA Risk Assessment.
The following rules have been provided by our FLRC Firewise coordinator, Kathy Cardona
1. Report all clean up of your property to the Firewise coordinator, this includes: cleaning your roof and gutters, trimming or cutting down of trees, cutting weeds, raking leaves and needles and cleaning your property of debris. Include in this report the number of hours worked, the number of people participating, the amount of debris hauled away by trailer or pickup load, and any amount of money spent hiring the work done.
2. If you are a new owner and your property has a fire pit you must contact the Firewise coordinator to get the fire safety talk before you light a single fire.
3. Before you move or put in a fire pit you must contact the Firewise coordinator to approve the site.
4. Fire pits will be inspected once a year - usually in May. You will be notified only if there is something that needs to be done to bring your fire pit into compliance.
5. Every three years everyone with a fire pit must take the refresher fire safety talk. Four sessions of these talks will be posted and an email reminder will be sent out.
Report your hours
Keeping our neighborhood safe includes work from us all. The work we perform is tracked, logged and monitored by the Firewise team and helps the community keep its certification. (FLRC's latest Firewise USA renewal application can be found here.) If you have performed work on your property or in a common area of our HOA, report those hours to the Firewise Committee by sending them an email or just give Kathy a call 503-755-2245 or 503-791-3341.
Committee Members: