Building a Wildfire Preparedness Plan

Wildfires are creating historic levels of danger and destruction in our communities each year. Fire behavior these days is entirely uncharacteristic of what urban and wildland firefighters dealt with in the past. What does this mean for businesses? It’s now more important than ever to build and implement a wildfire safety plan.

In this episode, Stan Szpytek (aka Stan the Fireman), President and CEO at Fire & Life Safety, Inc., gives actionable advice for conducting a vulnerability assessment that translates into an emergency management plan for wildfires and how it can save lives.

What we talked about:

• Why wildfires consistently break historical records
• Overlooked risks in wildfire incidents
• The importance of an all-hazards emergency management plan
• The concept of optimistic bias and how it relates to wildfire preparedness

Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:

• A Hazard Vulnerability Analysis Tool produced by Kaiser Permanente
• Episode 30 with Alexander Maranghides from NIST on lifesaving lessons from a wildfire study
• Episode 35 with Gianetta Jones from Coca-Cola UNITED on post-storm recovery

The Employee Safety Podcast is hosted by Peter Steinfeld, SVP of Safety Solutions at AlertMedia.

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to The Employee Safety Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here.