When it comes to wildfire safety, Fall River Estates is kind of like the teacher’s pet of Central Oregon.

In the last four years, all 120 lots in the subdivision two miles west of La Pine State Park have been thinned, lopped and whacked to reduce fuels that could spread a forest fire.

The community has also coordinated with federal agencies that manage public lands surrounding the neighborhood to create the same defensible space beyond the subdivision’s borders.

”We have tours that come through here now,” said Don Mercer, a Fall River Estates resident.

The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) actually drives vans full of people through the neighborhood so they can see what a ”fire-safe” community really looks like.

”The neighborhood is not stark, it’s still a forest and it’s still beautiful,” said Aileen Winge, another resident and key player in the neighborhood’s recent effort. ”But it is so much more fire-safe.”

So safe, in fact, that a letter of commendation from the Deschutes County commissioners will be presented to the community in an awards ceremony Saturday.

ODF officials said they hope other communities will emulate Fall River Estates.

About four years ago, a few residents of the subdivision asked Stu Otto, stewardship forester for ODF, to attend a meeting of the homeowners association and help convince residents to clean up their properties.

”We were lucky that ODF was out in the neighborhood,” Winge said. ”They talked to people, they were a presence. So it wasn’t just me out there trying to nag the neighbors.”

About $25,000 in National Fire Plan grants helped get local youths involved by offering them a small hourly fee in exchange for supervised forestry work.

The grant money was also used to buy chain saws and other equipment, and to hire professionals to do work that was difficult or dangerous.

People who live in other states own about half the properties in the subdivision.

But Winge contacted them, and each owner gave permission for people to reduce fuels on their properties. Some sent money to cover the costs, she added.

The work took more than two years, but residents say it was well worth the effort.

According to Winge, cleaning up the neighborhood actually turned out to be fun.

Now she knows all of the property owners in the subdivision, even the ones who live in Florida and Arizona.

”It’s something that can be done in every neighborhood,” she said. ”Ours happened to be a very small one. But I still think that if you divide a big neighborhood into small areas, and have people focus on their own small area, it’s amazing what you can get done.”

Jim Gustafson, La Pine Rural Fire Protection District fire marshal, said Fall River Estates is the only neighborhood in the area where every single piece of property can be called ”fire safe.”

The subdivision had a big organizational advantage over most neighborhoods in the area.

”We have very few subdivisions with homeowners associations,” he said.

Otto, the ODF forester, agreed that coordination was a key to the success in Fall River Estates.

”The community knew they were at risk (for wildfire), they accepted that, and then they took the responsibility to get involved,” he said.

Officials said they have reason to believe more neighborhoods will soon do the same.

This fall, Deschutes County became the first Oregon county to implement a bill passed by the state Legislature in 1997. The new law aims to protect homes from wildfire and reduce the rising cost of fire suppression.

Each piece of private property that falls into the designated wildland-urban interface – densely developed areas adjacent to wildlands – is required to participate in a self-certification program.

Homeowners in those areas have received – or will receive shortly – materials explaining that they have two years to get their properties in compliance with some simple wildfire-safety guidelines.

Once a homeowner believes his property meets the standards, he signs a certificate of compliance and returns it to ODF.

While the state’s planning of this program was just beginning, Fall River Estates residents decided to define their own fire-safety guidelines and make sure each resident complied with them.

Last year, the subdivision joined about 12 other neighborhoods along the Deschutes River between Bend and La Pine, to draft a ”community wildfire protection plan.”

Even before then, Fall River Estates residents coordinated with the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to create defensible space on the public lands that surround the subdivision on all sides.

According to Mercer, some members of the community first joined together to help clear hazardous fuels from BLM lands adjacent to their neighborhood more than four years ago. While tackling this project, the neighborhood’s fire-safety movement actually got started.

”As we were talking about it, we realized that the single most important thing we could do to protect our property was work (on) our own lots and encourage our neighbors to work (on) their own lots,” he said.