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City, county staff outline fuel-mitigation strategy, monitoring and research after drought and winter-storm impacts
Summary
Austin Water and Travis County staff described recent winter-storm and drought damage across the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve, plans to update fuel and fire-risk analyses, ongoing fuel-mitigation work including roughly 30 miles of shaded fuel breaks, and funding and staffing constraints for scaling mitigation.
Justin Bates, division manager for the Wildland Conservation Division with Austin Water, told the BCCP Coordinating Committee that recent winter storms and droughts have produced tree mortality and other damage across the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve and that staff are working to quantify how fuels and fire risk have changed.
Bates said staff are coordinating with the U.S. Forest Service to repeat a previous Baylor University fuel-study methodology so the team can measure changes over time. "We are working to get that agreement signed right now. We hope to have them out, as early as June, as late as probably September," he said, and added that initial data collection would continue through fall with preliminary results expected by this time…
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