Dammeron Valley is the kind of rural Utah community people dream about.
The town of fewer than 1,000 residents is nestled in the green foothills between Snow Canyon State Park and the Pine Valley Mountains north of St. George.
Homes here blend into the natural landscape — large front yards feature native sagebrush and juniper instead of cookie-cutter grass lawns
But with this beauty comes danger.
“Dammeron Valley sits right in the middle of the state's high-risk category,” said Fire Chief Chris Rieffer. “The reality is it's under threat.”
That’s especially true this year. Utah’s record warm, dry winter has made the state’s landscape ripe for summer fires.
Utah faces elevated wildfire risk statewide through June and July, according to the latest outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center. Southern Utah’s dry fire fuel conditions are near the worst the area has seen in the past century, said Dammeron Valley Battalion Chief Allen Cox.
“There’s no moisture left,” Cox said. “So, what we're looking at facing this year, nobody has seen before.”
Communities can’t eliminate their potential for fire, Chief Rieffer said, but there are proactive steps they can take to reduce their local risk. Dammeron Valley residents have been working for years to be ready for a drought-stricken season like this one.
“Is there a chance that this community could have a catastrophic wildfire? Yes,” Rieffer said. “Have we done what we can do to prepare? I can say, as a fire chief, yes.”
Dammeron Valley is southwestern Utah’s only Firewise community. That’s despite the fact that communities across fast-growing Washington County face extreme fire danger, according to climate risk modeling organization First Street. Dozens of cities in central and northern Utah have joined the federally sponsored fire prevention program.
It’s taken time, money and effort for Dammeron Valley to get Firewise, said resident Curtis Shelley, who chairs the town’s community fire council.
As recently as 2019, the town had an all-volunteer fire department, like many other small mountain communities. The following year, the town hired its first paid fire chief. Now, the department has a full-time staff of around 12, which allows it to respond 24/7.
There was some resistance at first, Shelley said, mostly because of the expanding fire budget, which surpassed $2 million last year. But a few things helped get residents on board.
The town has many older Utahns, and he said they’ve seen the value in having a quick response to medical emergencies. The fire department also found creative ways to fund its operations to limit how much it needed to raise resident fees — from hosting firefighting training events to sending its crews to aid in wildfires elsewhere. Watching the smoke rise from the Forsyth Fire in nearby Pine Valley last year further motivated residents to take action, Shelley said.
“None of us want to be forced out by fire,” he said. “How does a community work together to try to survive?”
Now, fire prevention is part of Dammeron Valley culture. Residents collectively spent around 2,000 hours last year doing mitigation work, such as clearing brush that often becomes fuel. The fire department holds a few workshops each year to educate residents on wildfire preparedness and evacuation processes. The fire marshal visits residents’ homes for free to walk through the property and explain what people should do to lower their risk.
The challenge going forward is avoiding complacency.
“This is a continuing effort,” Shelley said. “It needs to be something the community does in perpetuity.”
Because the brush just keeps growing back, and with climate change intensifying wildfire risk, there’s extra urgency for Utah communities to stay ready.
This work isn’t just about the town surviving a fiery destruction, Shelley said. It’s also about surviving a changing home insurance landscape. As wildfires destroy more and more neighborhoods, homeowners from the Salt Lake City foothills to Idaho and California have been hit with drastically increased rates or dropped coverage.
“There may be a day coming when you can't get insurance in some of these communities,” Shelley said. “The effort here now is to, among other things, make sure people can afford to live here.”
Dammeron Valley started a town insurance committee last year to better understand how fire risk is impacting people’s options. A survey found that 15% of residents had their insurance cancelled in the past five years, and nearly a third had seen a moderate to significant rise in premiums.
Many rural mountain communities risk either turning into ghost towns or becoming dominated by vacation homes owned by wealthy people who can afford the risk of not having insurance, Rieffer said.
“We could see in the next 10 years a giant shift of who lives out here and who doesn't,” he said, “but we're going to put this community right here in the best position possible. … Pretty much everything we do is to ensure that our community can survive what's coming.”
He hopes Dammeron Valley’s example can show other rural Utah towns what’s possible.
