Single Incident Information

A Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) Team has arrived in Westfir, Oregon to begin their assessment of the Cedar Creek Fire. The fire has covered 120,757 acres (to date) on the Willamette and Deschutes National Forests.

The Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) program is designed to identify and manage potential risks to resources on National Forest System lands and reduce these threats through appropriate emergency measures to protect human life and safety, property, and critical natural or cultural resources. BAER is an emergency program for emergency response work that involves time-critical activities to be completed before the first damaging event to meet program objectives:

BAER Objectives:

•  Determine whether imminent post-wildfire threats to human life and safety, property, and critical natural or cultural resources on National Forest System lands exist and take immediate actions, as appropriate, to manage the unacceptable risks.

•  If emergency conditions are identified, mitigate significant threats to health, safety, human life, property and critical cultural and natural resources.

•  Prescribe emergency response actions to stabilize and prevent unacceptable degradation to natural and cultural resources, to minimize threats to critical values resulting from the effects of a fire, or to repair/replace/construct physical improvements necessary to prevent degradation of land or resources.

•  Implement emergency response actions to help stabilize soil; control water, sediment and debris movement and potentially reduce threats to the BAER critical values identified above when an analysis shows that planned actions are likely to reduce risks substantially within the first year following containment of the fire.

•  Monitor the implementation and effectiveness of emergency treatments that were applied on National Forest System lands.