Willard Peak Fire underscores risks in North Ogden’s mountain neighborhoods

NORTH OGDEN — The recent Willard Peak Fire in North Ogden underscores the fire risks associated with development on mountains and in buffer zones where housing gives way to wildlands.

The blaze serves as a reminder “that as we keep building up the mountain, it’s harder and it’s more difficult to get fire apparatus up to the fire,” said Ryan Barker, deputy chief of North View Fire District, which serves North Ogden, Pleasant View and Harrisville.

Yet it also comes amid continuing interest in developing the mountainous area in North Ogden’s northern reaches, where the city’s biggest swaths of developable land sit, and debate about how to accommodate it. It’s not a new discussion, but it’s germane in the wake of the Willard Peak Fire. What’s more, it was focus of renewed attention this week when the North Ogden City Council discussed the fire preparedness plan that covers the city and adjacent Pleasant View.

Going forward, The Cove, sitting in the mountains above North Ogden with a view of Ogden and surrounding cities down below, will be a particular focus of fire mitigation and prevention efforts, said Barker, also a member of the North Ogden City Council.

Mason Cove, a different neighborhood that the Willard Peak Fire dangerously skirted in mid-August, “is an area of risk,” he told KSL.com. “But this year we’ve identified The Cove as the area that we need to work on.”

Housing in The Cove and Pole Patch, another high-altitude area of fire concern in adjacent Pleasant View, is “built into the scrub oak,” Barker said. Homeowners like being within the vegetation, “so that’s a bigger risk. … The potential fuel’s right there for a fire.”

Parallel to the development interest, city leaders in recent months have been discussing the future expansion of Mountain Road. That’s the thoroughfare taking shape section by section along the flank of the mountain above North Ogden that could grease the wheels for more mountainside housing in the years to come.

“That’s going to be one of the major corridors … between North Ogden, Pleasant View and Ogden,” Barker said.

To be sure, the Willard Peak Fire prompted plenty of hand-wringing among North Ogden officials. It led to the evacuation of around 150 homes, though firefighters ultimately prevented flames from getting to any of them, and burned 577 acres of open land. Indeed, the preparedness plan, more formally the Community Wildfire Preparedness Plan, spells out the potential fire risks.

North Ogden’s growth “has pushed development deeper into the (wildland-urban interface), increasing the number of homes and lives at risk during wildfire events. Many new homes are being built in fire-prone areas with limited ingress and egress routes, further complicating evacuation and suppression efforts,” it reads. The wildland-urban interface is where human development like houses bumps up against wildlands.

It further notes North Ogden’s “geographically isolated” location on the northern edge of Weber County. “This means that all automatic and mutual aid resources, whether from Ogden city or Weber Fire District, must travel northward and uphill to reach the district’s core WUI areas,” the plan reads.

Nevertheless, officials are cognizant of the challenges to mountainside development.

In the wake of Willard Peak Fire, mountainside development has been a renewed focus of discussion among North Ogden city staffers, said City Manager Jon Call. North View Fire District’s preparedness plan, the document discussed earlier this week by city leaders, will “help guide development discussions in the future,” Call said.

Barker, for his part, thinks city leaders are sufficiently attentive to the issue, balancing safety and property rights.

Landowners “have rights to develop their property,” he said. “So it’s hard to say you can’t do it. But it should be done correctly.”

But that doesn’t mean nothing needs to be done.

Barker said the likely efforts focused on higher fire-risk areas like The Cove will include visits to advise homeowners of how to temper the fire risks around their houses, by clearing brush, for instance. Fire officials also plan to bring chippers to target neighborhoods, letting homeowners process brush from their yards into the machines as a way of getting rid of overgrowth.

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