Sweet Home Fire Awarded Multiple Grants This Week - 09/26/25

SHFAD was notified this week of two large grant awards. The first a Community Wildfire Defense Grant sponsored by the US Forest Service via the USDA. This grant was a joint effort by a consortium known as the Linn Wildfire Mitigation Group which included SHFAD, the Oregon Department of Forestry South Cascade District, Lebanon Fire District, Linn County Juvenile Department, and both the South Santiam and Calapooia Watershed Counsels. Representatives of these agencies worked together to form a plan to provide improved wildfire defense for the region with a focus on the most at-risk areas. The effort was guided by the recently updated community wildfire protection plan. The 5-year project will center around 3 key strategies: Developing a strategic, sustainable and collaborative Project Pipeline; accelerating the pace of fuels reduction; and educating and empowering residents and community partners to reduce wildfire risks. The project pipeline will be a coordinated effort spearheaded by a CWDG coordinator from Sweet Home Fire, and a Fire Adapted Communities Specialist provided by the watershed counsels. The goal will be to develop a collaborative fuels project database, increase production of HIZ assessments to 850 assessment annually which will then be entered in the database and referred for implementation, and to plan fuels projects on forest properties utilizing an ODF funded Community Wildfire Forester. The fuels reduction portion of the project will include defensible space treatments, 6 “chipper days” per year where residents will have opportunities to bring vegetative debris in to be disposed of by use of the SHFAD chipper, and the Linn County Juvenile Department will provide 25 defensible space treatments as part of their workforce development program. The education portion of the plan will include community education events, individual outreach, youth education (k-12), and technical education/workfore training.

Wildland Division Chief Christian Whitfield represented Sweet Home Fire in the planning and grant-writing efforts. The consortium was awarded $8,711,040 in total, Sweet Home Fire will receive $5,343,087 of that total award.  Sweet Home Fire’s portion of the award will fund a project manager, half of the cost of the Wildland Division Chief’s position, as well as our 6 senior crew members on that Division, and fully fund a 10-person seasonal crew for 4 months. Also included in the award are the purchase of equipment including an excavator with a masticator, a pull rig, a transit van for personnel transport, a pickup truck, and smaller equipment such as chainsaws, chaps, and saw fuel.  

Following the notification of that grant award, Sweet Home Fire was notified that we were awarded an Assistance to Firefighters Grant award through FEMA. This grant awarded us $126,857 towards a $133,200 project. The project Will provide NFPA-compliant physicals and cancer screenings for our 74 firefighters for 2 years. This project is an effort to identify potentially life-threatening conditions in our firefighters to prevent line of duty deaths. The goal of the fire district is to establish long-term funding at the completion of the grant, to continue providing these screenings to our firefighters.