Devoted to helping individuals, businesses, and communities,
Wildfire Preparedness Services is a consulting company that provides advocacy, training and workshops for those of you in the Insurance Industry, Utilities, the Fire Service, Government entities, and NGO’s. By way of planning, preparing and ultimately, protecting lives, assets, and financial investments.
Thomas (Tom) Welle
Principal for Wildfire Preparedness Services, LLC
Welcome to Wildfire Preparedness Services. My name is Tom Welle and many of you may know me from my work as the National Program Manager for Firewise USA, National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). For over 30 years, I have dedicated my life to protecting communities, infrastructure and this nation from the ravages and loss caused by fire.
Previously, held the position of a line Fire Captain on structural and wildland fire incidents in multiple states, coordinator for tactical aircraft for the U.S. Forest Service, and served on a Type III Incident Management team. I have also performed as a primary ground reconnaissance asset, for emergency managers on the largest and most costly, wildfires in Colorado history.
By far, the most important work I have done was with the NFPA’s Wildfire Division. I worked with communities, insurance and real estate industries nation wide to help educate and train people to reduce their risks from wildfire. Firewise reaches over 1600 communities in 42 states and I personally worked with them to reduce risks. But it’s not enough.
Over the last several years, not only are individual homes and communities being destroyed, but entire towns. Schools, big block stores, hospitals and elder care facilities are not being spared. Our utility infrastructure is threatened so that even communities untouched by fire are affected by power loss and increased costs. Insured losses have exceeded anything we have seen in the past. The ability to get and maintain adequate insurance at affordable costs is becoming more difficult for those living in high risk areas.
The economic impacts are not sustainable, and most people don’t understand that it can take them 2-5 years to rebuild their homes, but much longer to rebuild their lives and their sense of community.
Extreme wildfires place our firefighters in danger when we, as home and business owners have not done our part to give them a fighting chance to do their jobs. We owe it to them and to ourselves to do more, to do better.
This is not a wildfire problem; it is a structural ignition problem. By spending billions in fire suppression, we have not been able to reduce our losses. We cannot suppress our way out of this problem.
Yet, we continue to build in areas that are at risk for extreme wildfire. This is not a problem that government can solve. We have to solve it ourselves by assessing our risks and using science-based guidance to increase the ignition resistance of our built environment and its immediate surroundings and then make sure we can get people out of the way. The goal is that everyone goes home, and everyone has a home to come back to.
We need to stop thinking like victims and start acting like survivors. We live here, it’s our problem to solve. It takes focus, education, commitment, collaboration and most of all work. It takes all of us if we hope to make a difference.
I will work with you to provide guidance and expertise to help you make sound, science-based decisions. Depending on your individual situation and need, go to my services page and see how I might help you be better prepared for wildfire.