Evacuating Large Animals
Evacuating Horses or Livestock? Many community members in Kittitas County own livestock and other animals. There are specific steps you can take to prepare for evacuating animals and ensuring their safety. Learn more from FEMA: Preparing Farm Animals for Disaster
Know what to do if a wildfire is approaching
If a wildfire is approaching your home, it is important to know what steps to take to protect your home and evacuate safely. Use this checklist from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety as a starting point.
Make an Evacuation Plan
It is important to know which types of disasters could affect your area. Know how you’ll contact one another and reconnect if separated. Establish a family meeting place that’s familiar and easy to find. Ready.gov provides detailed advice on how to create an evacuation or shelter-in-place plan.
Stay informed
Get alerted about emergencies and other important community news by signing up for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Management Alerts. This system provides you with critical information quickly in a variety of situations, such as severe weather, wildfires, unexpected road closures, missing persons and evacuations of buildings or neighborhoods. Sign up via Everbridge
Living with Wildfire: A Defensible Space Guide
Many people see the large flame fronts on the news and figure that’s what burned the homes. However, most homes are not destroyed by these huge walls of flames, but by the little embers. Wildfire embers can travel over a mile and you can control what happens when they land by employing effective defensible space. […]
Building a new home in Kittitas County?
Did you know that Kittitas County has a “Wildland Urban Interface” or WUI Code? This is a set of building codes for all unincorporated areas of the county to reduce structure risk from wildfires. This helps homeowners and first responders in the case of a fire. If you’re building a new home, you should read […]
Retrofit your home with wildfire in mind
Research has shown there are clear steps you can take to give your home a much better chance of surviving an encounter with wildfire. This guide provides four sets of steps that are grouped to provide the most impact for the time and cost involved. Get started today and be Wildfire Ready. These steps include: […]
Find ideas for fire-resistant landscaping
A well-designed landscape around a home is key to reducing the risk of loss from a wildland fire. Maintaining that landscape is essential to providing defensible space for the home and for providing for the safety of firefighters when a wildland fire occurs. Use the guides below to learn about ways to landscape your property […]
Become a Firewise USA® recognized community!
“The national Firewise USA® recognition program provides a collaborative framework to help neighbors in a geographic area get organized, find direction, and take action to increase the ignition resistance of their homes and community and to reduce wildfire risks at the local level.” View Firewise communities and current fires using the National Fire Protection Association’s […]
Flora & Fauna Around You
The plants and animals that live around your home and in Kittitas County are resilient to fire. You can learn more about them and identify the species of flora and fauna that are around you with a few tools on your cellphone. iNaturalist iNaturalist is a social network for sharing biodiversity information to help […]
