Thanks to everyone who filled out the post-fire survey. It offers some useful guidance for us.

Summary

The raw results follow, but here are some recurring themes:

Needs

Housing, labor, legal advice, revegetation advice. So far there’s been a big outpouring of community support, but please let us know if needs are unmet. We’re working on forestry and related issues, as are others.

What worked

• Firefighters
• Evacuation notices
• Email, Facebook
• Early packing and preparation
• Checklists
• Removing combustibles around homes
• Mowing & defensible space
• Watering

What would you do differently?

Often, the answer is “more of the above,” including in particular:

• Fuel reduction and fireproofing
• Prepare for power outages
• Prepare home to save firefighter effort
• Turn off propane (at tank and devices)
• Leave earlier
• Stay longer to defend area
• Sprinkler system
• Fill buckets
• Scan documents

What could be improved?

• Coordination of road closure and reopening information
• Exclusion of gawkers
• Horse trailer access

A big question on many minds is evidently, what happened to air support on Saturday morning? We don’t have an answer at present.

Communication

While many were happy with evacuation notification, this was also a sore point. We cross-checked comments about evacuation notice against locations:

• Bridger Canyon Rd, Kelly Canyon to Jackson Creek: 2 positive, 1 negative
• Bridger Canyon Rd, north of Jackson: 2 positive, 6 negative
• Aspen Meadow: 2 positive, 0 negative
• Jackson Creek: 0 positive, 1 negative

This is a small sample, but it does appear that a majority of respondents in the Bridger Canyon Road corridor north of Jackson Creek had a bad experience.

I think this is a fundamentally hard problem, due to the variety of media involved, the rapid evolution of the fire, etc. When the dust settles, we will share these thoughts with the agencies in order to improve.

Several people mentioned cell towers. Cell towers have been explicitly legal in the zoning regulation since BCPOA spearheaded an amendment in 2014, with input from Verizon and Atlas Towers. To date, the tower at Bridger Bowl is only occupied by Verizon. So the problem appears to be lack of provider interest. It’s not clear what we can do to sweeten the deal, but this bears some thought.

Full Results

The full results as of 9/12 are in Survey results as of 2020 09 12 4pm.pdf, slightly redacted to eliminate private or location-specific information.

Afterthoughts? Missed it?

The survey is still open at https://forms.gle/Tepu7MiqtVQrAiDw9