It’s late in the summer of 2022. A dry lightning storm has moved through the Wallowa Valley, and fires are breaking out throughout the area.

The Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office is among the agencies that sends resources to the valley to help battle the blazes and protect structures. Chris Paul, a wildland fire-risk reduction specialist for the agency, gets a call from another agency representative with an unusual message: Check out this place called Lostine, the representative tells Paul. Despite the ferocity of the fires, community members have told officials that they won’t need a lot of those resources to protect their structures.

When Paul arrives at Lostine, he finds a community that years before had banded together to embrace the Firewise program to talk with neighbors about fire risks, to tackle fuel-reduction work around their homes and to build a communications plan for when wildfire came calling.

So, Paul said, if a fire did come to the community, “it was going to be easy to protect, was going to be easy to stage resources. And it was going to use a minimal amount of resources to help protect that community.”

Paul had seen plenty of communities where that wasn’t the case, and the Lostine example stuck with him. He started thinking: What’s a good way to spread the word about the Firewise program to other communities facing the threat of wildfire?

Just about two years later, he has his answer: “Neighbors Helping Neighbors: The Lostine Firewise Film,” a 30-minute documentary, gets its premiere showing Wednesday, May 8, at the OK Theatre in Enterprise, as part of a double bill with the documentary “The West Is Burning.” The two movies will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Lostine community members and wildfire officials.

Firewise and Lostine

The national Firewise program, administered by the National Fire Protection Association, provides a collaborative framework to help neighbors get organized and take action to make their homes less vulnerable to fire and to reduce wildfire risks. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters.

Lostine residents had been talking about Firewise since 2017, when Nils Christoffersen, the executive director of the nonprofit Wallowa Resources, suggested area residents contact Alyssa Cudmore, now the forestland program manager at the organization, to learn more about it.

Neighbor to neighbor, Lostine residents embraced the Firewise program, Cudmore said.

“And that’s what Firewise communities are about,” she said. “It’s about leaning on each other, thinking about the skill sets, the expertise, the resources you’ve got in your community, the people that you see every day.”

Lostine residents won grants to purchase firefighting equipment, to create defensible space around their homes, to hire forestry contractors who worked on the landscape to help reduce the fuels that feed wildfire.

It all paid off in the summer of 2022.

After that fire season, Paul, armed with $30,000 from the state, approached Wallowa Resources about the possibility of making a Firewise documentary that focused on Lostine. (Wallowa Resources previously had worked with Landmark Studios at the University of Arizona to produce “The West Is Burning.”)

“It was my harebrained idea and way-out vision that I pitched to them, and they took it and ran with it,” Paul said.

“They” included Haley Thompson, a Joseph-based documentary filmmaker and freelance film editor, who had done work with Wallowa Resources before. “We are so lucky to have someone with such an amazing skill set here in the county,” Cudmore said of Thompson.

And Paul particularly appreciated the fresh set of eyes Thompson brought to the project.

“She doesn’t come with the fire background that the rest of us have,” he said. “As we’re talking about stuff around the table or on the Zoom calls, she’s sitting there going, ‘Oh, hold on, hold on. I don’t understand that. So we need to make sure our audience is going to understand this.’ ”

Paul’s hope is that communities around Oregon use “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” (and an introductory two-minute trailer meant as a teaser for the longer film) as a tool to start their own conversations. (Work is nearing completion on a facilitator’s guide that can be used with the film to help with those conversations.)

And both Paul and Cudmore hope that the film sends another message: People aren’t helpless in the face of wildfire.

“We can never fireproof our landscapes, nor our homes; that’s part of living in the wildland-urban interface,” Cudmore said. “Fire is part of that landscape. But there are lots of things you can do to prepare yourself as a community. … There are a lot of things you can do to make your home safer and your landscape more resilient to fire.”

If You Go

What: Screenings of the documentaries “Neighbors Helping Neighbors: The Lostine Firewise Film” and “The West Is Burning.”

When: 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 8. “The West Is Burning” shows at 5 p.m.; “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” shows at 6:30 p.m. A panel discussion with local landowners and representatives from agencies follows at 7:15 p.m.

Where: The OK Theatre, 208 W. Main St., Enterprise.

How much: It’s free.

RSVP: Go online to wallowaresources.org/calendar.