This article is from Tennessee Lookout

As Tennessee’s communities increasingly bleed into wildlife areas, the state’s Division of Forestry is pushing for a pilot program to shore up wildfire defenses.

The “Wildland Urban Interface” — the line where nature and human development collide — has increased by about 2 million acres in Tennessee, State Forester Heather Slayton said.

The National Association of State Foresters estimated 43,771 communities in the South are at risk for wildfire as of 2021.

“We’ve had a lot of folks come into Tennessee, and they want to obviously live in our natural resources, so managing for wildfire is becoming more complex,” she said.

Slayton is asking for an additional $245,000 in the Department of Agriculture and Forestry budget to build a 3-person wildfire resilience team that would train volunteer and paid fire departments in the Chattanooga, Knoxville and Crossville area.

About 87% of Tennessee fire departments are in some way dependent on volunteers, Slayton said, which often results in high turnover, increasing the need for regular training.

“They are oftentimes the first on the scene and we need them to be safe,” Slayton said. “We need them to understand how small fires in that Wildland Urban Interface can exponentially increase into wildfires, and then we need them to be able to integrate into our complex wildland fire operations.”

The funding request is a small slice of the department’s overall $54.5 million budget increase request, which would fund a state center for agriculture and forestry, farm cost-sharing and economic development programs and other projects.

_ Cassandra Stephenson