Residents of Haystack and Himalaya urged the Regional Emergency Service Advisory Committee and borough staff on Monday to support prepositioning structural defense kits — portable pump, tank and sprinkler systems that defenders say slow or stop wildfire spread to houses.

The discussion followed public comments from Haystack resident James Strickland and neighbor Lisa Young, who described community efforts to set up portable tanks and sprinkler systems during recent lightning-started fires that threatened their subdivisions. “We were the first five in the community up there to get them because we were closest to the fire,” James Strickland said, describing local use and a community firefighter willing to provide training. Lisa Young said forestry staff told her they could help the community pursue a grant to buy tanks and equipment because the area is classified as rural.

Why it matters: speakers said local, prepositioned kits can reduce response time and the need to haul crews and equipment from outside the Fairbanks area. Committee members and staff discussed whether the borough can directly purchase and deploy kits, and what the borough could reasonably do to support communities that want to organize and train volunteers to operate the equipment.

Public comments and community practice

James Strickland, a Haystack resident, described buying his own system after two fires threatened his neighborhood and estimated local staging of kits might cost “probably 3 or $400,000 a year total” for the borough if it supplied multiple caches. He said a forester who lives in the community was willing to certify local volunteers to set up and maintain the systems.

Lisa Young, also a Haystack resident, said some houses were operating on “two containers per two houses” and that not everyone has a well or easy access to water. She described coordination with Himalaya residents and forestry staff and said the current response teams were still finding hot spots. “They said the fires aren’t complete. They can’t give me a correct number,” Young said when asked about total suppression costs; she also cited national and local cost figures heard from contacts, including a national 2024 figure of $392,000,000,000 spent on fires and a per-flight cost she said was $87,000 for large suppression aircraft.

Local adaptation and low-cost solutions

Commenters described improvised approaches used in previous fires: folding-frame tanks made from lumber and Visqueen, locally sewn large bladders, and bladders staged near airstrips to provide reserve water. “We just made them out of 2 by sixes … and used the 10 mil Visqueen and made our own tanks and set them up in 15, 20 minutes,” one Haystack resident said. Gary Young suggested exploring grounding rods or other lightning-mitigation research with the University of Alaska Fairbanks to address lightning-caused ignitions in the area.

Borough powers, planning and limits

Ian, a borough staff member, told the committee the borough does not have wildland fire authorities that would allow it to operate a borough-wide program from existing funds: “the borough doesn’t have wildland fire powers. So this wouldn’t be something that the borough, as it stands, would be able to spend funds on without it being a specific grant purchase and request.” He said fire service areas and their contractors retain core response authorities and that resource allocation (which crew is pulled to respond) follows the standard mutual-aid/resource-pool process used by Forestry and federal partners.

Committee discussion and next steps

Committee members and residents discussed models for storage and distribution (community homeowners associations, central conex storage, or staging at fire-service facilities), volunteer training and certification, grant funding, and educational outreach so homeowners understand kits and how they are used. Mr. Roderman highlighted a model used near Gold King Creek — pumping into a centrally located large bladder to create a reserve for surges — as a deployable tactic for some communities.

Committee member Jenny Haney said she would prepare a resolution to add support for funding structural defense kits to the borough’s legislative priorities and circulate a draft for members’ feedback. “We have a lobbyist. Okay? We pay a lobbyist. And we should get this on our legislative priority list, without a doubt,” Haney said. The committee asked the clerk to circulate the draft resolution and invited members and the public to submit comments electronically.

Other operational notes

Speakers noted differences between forestry/BLM fire mapping and borough evacuation maps: borough staff said the borough’s evacuation maps are intentionally broader than street-level fire maps to avoid residents interpreting small boundary differences as reason not to evacuate. The borough’s public GIS layers for roads and evacuation boundaries are available online, but staff acknowledged phone display limitations and encouraged public education about the available layers.

Ending

The committee did not take a formal vote. Members agreed to pursue a nonbinding resolution for the borough’s legislative agenda, pursue grant pathways with state and federal partners where appropriate, and support local education and training efforts for communities that want to preposition kits for wildfire season.