Winter Park Highlands Association

No reviews

Trash and Recycling Program with The Trash Company WPHA has partnered with The Trash Company of Granby, Colorado to provide trash and single-stream recycling services to members of WPHA who wish to participate. Dumpsters maintained by The Trash Company are in place in Elk Park by Bielenberg Pond. The combined services are available to members for $20 a month. If you want to sign up but haven’t yet, please contact Robin Conger or Jodi Strickland (970) 627-8531 or JodiS@WasteConnections.com. You must be a member of WPHA to participate in the service, and membership must be renewed each year in order to continue participation from year to year. The dumpster(s) are locked with combination locks; households who sign up will be given the combination(s). In the spring of 2012 we will be exploring ways to soften the visual impact of the dumpsters. Grand County Emergency Services The Grand Fire Protection District has lots of information on its website about emergency preparedness—check out www.grandfire.org. Click on the Public Information tab, then click on the Fire Safety and Prevention tab. Under the heading Family Preparedness you will find two links, one to a document called “Why Prepare?” and one to a Supplies Kit Checklist. The website also contains helpful information on protecting your home should a wildfire strike. Be prepared! Check out the excellent brochure Wildfire, and the helpful cheat-sheet Get Ready! The Grand County Office of Emergency Management also has a helpful brochure called Emergency Information Resources. Grand County Burn Program (http://www.co.grand.co.us/DNR/Links/BurnBooklet.pdf) Grand County runs its open burn season in the winter months when fire danger is low. The season opens when there is 3-6 inches of permanent snow on the ground county-wide, which is usually about mid-November, and closes around April 1, depending on the presence or absence of snow. A person wishing to burn must complete and receive an approved open burning permit from the Grand County Division of Natural Resources (GCDNR) prior to any slash pile burning where the pile exceeds 3 ft. diameter and 2 ft. tall. Please note that though the office is “closed” on the weekend, Grand County still runs the burn program via an on-call system so people can burn on the weekends. If you live within a town limit, please check with your local town hall for burning regulations as they will supercede the county regulations. Copies of approved burn permits must be available on-site during the burning operation in case of complaint or inspection. Burning activities should also include plans for safety and supplemental water sources. Persons burning slash piles should, but are not required, have the following: leather gloves; shovels; suitable footwear; masks for covering the mouth and nose; and proper eye protection. As a courtesy, individual(s) planning the burning operation should notify adjacent landowners who may be affected by smoke, including the date, times, and exact location of the burn. All Grand County permit holders must call the GCDNR for approval to ignite any pile each time they want to burn. Pile burning must be conducted under suitable weather conditions. The mountain valley area we live in provides perfect conditions for nightly cold air inversions which keep smoke and other air pollutants close to the ground by having warmer air above colder air at the ground surface acting as a “lid.” In the morning, the inversion can be broken if the sun is able to heat the surface enough to heat the air and get the layers to mix. In the evening as the sun goes down, the ground surface cools faster than the air above and the inversion is back. Due to this typical daily weather pattern, our burn “windows” generally run from 10 am to 4 pm. High pressure systems can hold these inversions in place creating poor smoke dispersal conditions for days or even weeks. State regulations require that Grand County may only allow burning when smoke dispersal ratings are Good or better according to the NOAA smoke dispersal forecast and/or chance of precipitation is greater than 70 %. Slash piles may be ignited by several means. If the needles and fine fuels within the pile have dried through the summer, ignition can be easily accomplished with matches and a large ball of newspaper placed within the bottom of the pile. If fuels are still partially green, or the pile is wet from rain or melting snow, then a hotter and longer heat source may be necessary. Propane torches, kerosene, diesel fuel, sawdust soaked with diesel fuel or flares used for highway emergencies are common methods used to ignite piles. Do not use gasoline for this purpose. Once you have received approval from GCDNR to burn, a test pile should be ignited to see if it burns and at what rate. The test pile also determines whether smoke management requirements can be met prior to igniting other piles. If suitable burning conditions exist, then additional piles may be started. Ignite only those piles that can be controlled by the available manpower and resources until they have burned down. You can slow the rate of burning (and possible scorching of adjacent trees) by shoveling snow or spraying water into the pile and cooling the fire down. As a general rule, one person can manage 3-6 closely situated piles. Grand County Ordinance 8 states that fires must be attended while flame is present, among other requirements. After the piles have burned down, chunk-in any unburned slash and wood into the hot coals in the center of the pile. As much as 95% of the original slash can be consumed by aggressive chunking-in. At all times, piles may need to be actively mopped-up if the weather conditions will not extinguish the fire, or if the fires could escape. If high winds or melting snow increases this risk, then all burning materials must be mopped-up. Helpful Links to Grand County Services and Information Address Signs The Upper Fraser Valley Community Wildfire Protection Plan reported that Winter Park Highlands has a serious problem with missing or inadequate individual home address signage. This is a major safety issue. Inadequate or hard to read signage makes it much harder for rescue or fire personnel to find a home quickly in the event of an emergency. According to the CWPP, every building should have a permanently posted, reflective address marker mounted on a non-combustible pole. Signs should be made of fire-resistant materials (e.g. metal). The sign should be placed and maintained at each driveway entrance. Care should be taken to ensure that the location will not become obscured by vegetation, snow, or other features, whether natural or manmade. It is critical that the location and markings are adequate for easy night-time viewing. For several years the Board has been encouraging homeowners to install appropriate signage for and on their homes. Now it is a reality—as directed by the membership in 2011, WPHA funded the purchase and installation of CWPP-compliant signs at the home of every 2011 member of the Association and 2012 members on record as of May 1, 2012. Signs for members who join or renew after that date will be installed later in the year. The signs have been installed in county right-of-way at the end of each driveway (after clearing the installation sites with the county locator service). Here is what the signs look like: