Washoe County continues to approve new subdivisions in some of its highest wildfire-risk terrain, even though Reno already carries the highest wildfire risk of any city in the country, according to the research group Headwaters Economics.

To show readers exactly how much of that risk sits around their own home, The Nevada Independent built the below interactive map, showing Washoe County's wildfire hazard zones down to the address level along with outlines of past and recent wildfires. 

Search your address within the county to see your home's risk zone.

So what happens if your home falls into one of those zones? There's still a lot that can be done — building a neighborhood-wide plan, finding grant money to pay for it, hardening your house itself and changing behavior on the riskiest days.

Grant money for wildfire mitigation usually starts with a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a document that lays out where a community's risk is concentrated and what work would reduce it. Eric Roussel, a fire management officer for the Nevada Division of Forestry, said his agency wrote a plan for Somersett — the Peavine Peak subdivision that has weathered a few fires this summer, most notably the Hawk fire — in 2022, and the neighborhood used it to win a $2.5 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant. 

Reno's updated Community Wildfire Protection Plan, adopted this February, works the same way at the city level. It calls for reducing hazardous vegetation and expanding defensible-space work in neighborhoods across the city, and keeps Reno eligible for that same pool of federal grant money going forward.

Individual neighborhoods don't have to wait to start the process, though. Fire Adapted Nevada, the state's community wildfire preparedness program, has recognized 60 "Firewise" communities so far, with 19 more applications pending and roughly 30 trained ambassadors helping other neighborhoods work toward the designation, according to program coordinator Kelli Nevills. To qualify, a whole neighborhood has to show real defensible-space work and home hardening together, not just a handful of individual homeowners doing it on their own. 

When firefighters see that a neighborhood has Firewise status, it lets them know the homes in the area are already defensible, allowing them to focus on stopping the fire itself instead of defending individual houses.

Most of the participation in the program has been concentrated along Nevada's western front so far, but communities such as Cold Creek, near Las Vegas, and Spring Creek, which has a large homeowners association, are also Firewise recognized. Neighborhoods interested in earning the designation can find more information through Fire Adapted Nevada.

Coordinated funding doesn't reach every neighborhood in the state evenly, though. Nevills said smaller, less-resourced communities often can't put together the grant applications or matching funds that larger, better-organized ones can, which is part of why the Nevada Division of Forestry has pushed for no-match assistance grants aimed at the places with the least capacity to compete on their own. 

A recent Nevada Fire Chiefs Association grant, worth roughly $1 million, targeted those communities, paying for defensible-space work around the homes of seniors in Humboldt County. Lander County is now running a similar program in Battle Mountain.

But with roughly 80 percent of Nevada's land federally managed, often checkerboarded against private land, the state's mitigation work also depends on shared stewardship agreements with federal agencies to decide where prevention happens. 

Homeowners don't have to wait on any of that. Megan Kay, who manages the University of Nevada's Living With Fire program, said the most important area to clear is the 5 feet immediately around the house, where windblown embers land and catch on anything flammable — mulch, dry leaves, stacked wood — before a fire even arrives. Beyond that zone, breaking up continuous vegetation with varied heights and hardscaping keeps a yard from carrying fire toward the house like a wick.

Roussel said one change costs nothing and can be the most effective: adjusting behavior on red flag warning days, when wind, heat and dryness combine to make sparks catastrophic. 

He said the riskiest behaviors are often the most ordinary ones: target shooting, riding a dirt bike or UTV through dry terrain, running a mower or tractor through dry grass or being careless with a cigarette. He recalled driving past a man operating a backhoe in a cheatgrass field during one such warning, shortly after the Hawk Fire was finally contained.

"A spark off of that bucket will release the next monster on the landscape," Roussel said.