Tribal Hazard Mitigation Plan
2026 to 2031

Start here

A plan to protect people, homes, water, and culture

Fort McDermitt faces real hazards. The USDA rates the Reservation's wildfire risk higher than 97 percent of communities in the United States. The community was under a boil-water advisory during the planning site visit. Summers are getting hotter, drought is a way of life, and a drug crisis reaches the community along the highway that bisects it.

This plan looks at each hazard honestly, using the community's own history and knowledge, and sets out practical projects to reduce the harm before it happens. It was prepared under the direction of the Fort McDermitt Tribal Council, with planning support from the Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation and Adaptation International, and funding from the EPA Indian Environmental General Assistance Program.

This is the Tribe's first hazard mitigation plan prepared for FEMA approval. Once adopted by the Tribal Council and approved by FEMA, the Tribe becomes eligible for federal hazard mitigation grants, including the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, that can pay for the projects inside it.

The five hazards that carry the greatest priority

Every hazard was scored using the same twelve factors, from probability and health impacts to cultural wellbeing and recovery cost. These five rank highest.

Five goals guide everything in this plan

The goals were developed from community survey priorities, Tribal Council direction, and the requirements of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. Every mitigation action traces back to at least one of them.

What the plan commits to, in numbers

Cost bands are planning-level estimates. Actual costs are refined when each project is scoped for a funding application.

Where this plan stands

This edition is the Tribal Review and Validation draft, prepared for review by the Fort McDermitt Tribal Council, Tribal departments, and community members before submission to FEMA Region 9. Adoption by Tribal Council resolution follows FEMA's approvable-pending-adoption finding; the signed resolution will be inserted in Appendix A of the plan document.

Our people, our land

The Numu and Newe peoples

The Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe brings together Northern Paiute, the Numu, and Western Shoshone, the Newe, peoples whose ancestors have lived in the northern Great Basin for thousands of years. The community traces its deepest roots to the Atsakudokwa Tuviwa ga yu, the People of the Red Mountain, the Paiute band whose homeland centers on the Quinn River country and the mountains that ring it.

For countless generations these families moved with the seasons across what is now northern Nevada and southeastern Oregon, fishing the Quinn River, hunting deer, pronghorn, and small game across the sagebrush steppe, and gathering pine nuts, chokecherries, wild turnips, yampa roots, berries, and healing plants including sage and juniper. Food and medicine were not separate systems. They were one relationship with the land, carried in ceremony, song, and language.

That way of life was upended in the mid-1800s, when emigrant roads, mining camps, ranching, and soldiers swept into the Quinn River country, and competition for water and forage sparked violent conflict across the region.

How the Reservation came to be

The United States Army established a military camp on the East Fork of the Quinn River in 1865, later named Fort McDermit for a colonel killed nearby that year. When the Army withdrew, the post buildings passed to the Indian Service, and on July 5, 1889 the fort and its surrounding lands were formally set aside as a reservation for the Paiute and Shoshone families who had gathered there. The Tribe organized under the Indian Reorganization Act, adopting its Constitution in 1936, and is governed today by an eight-member Tribal Council.

For most of its history the Reservation covered about 35,183 acres. In 2016 the Nevada Native Nations Land Act transferred an additional 19,094 acres of former BLM land to the Tribe, bringing the total to roughly 54,277 acres spanning the state line: about 40 percent in Humboldt County, Nevada and 60 percent in Malheur County, Oregon. The Tribe also holds the Hog John Ranch, a separate 145-acre parcel to the south, which is excluded from this plan's risk assessment because it has no structures or residents.

The old military post is not only history. Buildings from the cavalry era still stand and remain in community use, including the structure that now serves as the Senior Center. The name the community carries, Fort McDermitt, holds both the memory of the military period and more than 130 years of the Tribe making this place its permanent home.

Sovereignty and government

The Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe is a federally recognized sovereign nation that exercises inherent governmental authority over its lands, members, and resources. The Tribal Council, elected by the membership, exercises both legislative and executive authority under the 1936 Constitution. Tribal departments include Administration, the Environmental Department, Housing, the Wellness Center, Social Services, and Public Works. The Tribe adopts this plan by Council resolution, and the Council directs its implementation.

Natural and cultural resources

Natural resources on and around the Reservation are living cultural resources that sustain the physical, emotional, spiritual, and economic wellbeing of the Fort McDermitt people. Tribal members continue to hunt deer and small game, fish the Quinn River, and gather traditional foods and medicines including pine nuts, chokecherries, yampa roots, wild turnips, berries, willow for basket weaving, and sage and juniper for ceremony. About half of the Tribe's adults speak Paiute fluently, among the strongest language retention rates of any Paiute community, and the annual Birthday Celebration each July marks the Reservation's 1889 establishment with a powwow, hand games, and gatherings that draw families home from across the region.

Spiritual practice is the foundation of the community's culture rather than one part of it. Gathering plants, hunting, preparing traditional foods, and traveling to places on and off the Reservation to pray are not separate activities. They are expressions of one relationship. The Tribe therefore treats harm to ceremonial places, to the materials ceremony requires, and to the ability of members to reach and use them as a direct loss to community wellbeing, standing alongside damage to a home or a road rather than beneath it. Every hazard profile carries a Cultural Wellbeing score for this reason, and Goal 4 of the mitigation strategy commits the Tribe to protecting these practices.

The locations of sacred sites, burial grounds, gathering areas, and springs of cultural significance are protected information held by the Tribe. They are not mapped, listed, or described in this plan or in any grant application prepared under it.

These resources are under real pressure. Wildfire and cheatgrass conversion have degraded gathering areas. Legacy mercury mining left contamination that residents still navigate. Juniper and other ceremonial plants are being cleared at mine sites adjacent to the Reservation. This plan records those pressures in the hazard profiles and answers them in the action plan, including ED-03, which inventories and protects culturally significant sites and plant populations from environmental degradation.

Where things stand today

The Reservation community is small, remote, and resourceful. About 326 people live in 125 households, most of them along North and South Reservation Roads near the old fort site. The town of McDermitt, on US 95 at the state line about four miles away, holds the nearest school and fire station. Winnemucca, the Humboldt County seat and the nearest full-service hospital, pharmacy, and grocery hub, is 73 miles south.

The 2020 loss of the Red Mountain Travel Plaza, the community's only fuel and grocery retailer, in a fire suspected to be arson, removed the last on-Reservation source of daily supplies and 13 Tribal jobs. Rebuilding commercial capacity remains a Council priority, and the loss shapes several hazard profiles in this plan: every gallon of fuel and bag of groceries now travels the single US 95 corridor.

Emergency services, honestly assessed

This plan is candid about response capacity because mitigation planning only works when it starts from the truth. Four gaps define the current picture.

The Fort McDermitt Combined School in McDermitt serves the community's children from both states, one of very few schools in the nation that draws its student body across a state line. Its distance from the Reservation, about four miles by highway, is a recurring consideration in the hazard profiles: family reunification during a wildfire, winter storm, or violent incident depends on that stretch of US 95.

Existing plans, programs, and studies this plan builds on

The planning team reviewed and incorporated the Tribe's existing plans and the state and county plans that cover the Reservation. The most important are listed here; the full reference list is in Records and reference.

What the Tribe can bring to this work

The Tribe's capabilities are real but stretched thin. The Environmental Department carries most hazard-related work, from water quality monitoring to noxious weed control to post-fire reseeding, and has a strong grant track record with EPA, the Bureau of Reclamation, and USDA. Administration manages federal awards and Council coordination. The Wellness Center provides basic health care and community health outreach, including the naloxone distribution program. Public Works maintains roads, water infrastructure, and heavy equipment used for firebreaks and snow clearing.

Financial capacity depends substantially on federal grant programs. Tribal revenue is constrained, and there is no tax base or gaming revenue. The Tribe's demonstrated ability to win and manage EPA GAP, Bureau of Reclamation, NTIA broadband, and Brownfields funding is the foundation the action plan builds on, and each action in this plan names the federal programs most likely to fund it.

Education and outreach run through the Tribe's Facebook page, flyers and word of mouth, the Birthday Celebration and other community gatherings, the school parent network, and the Senior Center. Mutual aid and working relationships exist with the McDermitt Fire District, Humboldt and Malheur County emergency management, BLM, BIA law enforcement, the Nevada Division of Emergency Management, the Oregon Department of Emergency Management, the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, and the Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation.

Gaps the mitigation actions are built to close

• No all-hazards Emergency Operations Plan. Action CC-01 creates one in Year 1.
• No staffed EMS, no Tribal fire department, and no Tribal police. Actions CC-02, WF-01, and VA-01 build coordination protocols and capacity where full services are not yet feasible.
• No formally designated cooling or warming center with backup power. Actions EH-01 and WS-03 designate and equip them.
• No automated water treatment and an aging distribution system. The WQ actions modernize monitoring, treatment, and infrastructure.
• No dedicated emergency management office. Plan maintenance assigns clear responsibility and keeps the Council engaged; see Keeping it current.

How the plan was built

Eighteen months of listening, mapping, and checking the work

This plan was developed between February 2025 and mid-2026 under the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 and FEMA's tribal mitigation planning regulations at 44 CFR 201.7, following the 2025 Tribal Mitigation Planning Handbook.

The work ran in four phases: organizing the planning effort and coordinating with surrounding jurisdictions, assessing risk hazard by hazard, developing the mitigation strategy, and assembling, reviewing, and validating the plan itself. The Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation, of which the Tribe is a member along with the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, and the Burns Paiute Tribe, provided planning coordination, with technical support from Adaptation International and funding through the EPA Indian Environmental General Assistance Program.

Tribal leadership of the process passed through several hands, a reality of small tribal governments that the plan documents openly. Duane Masters led emergency management at the April 2025 kickoff; Clifton Smart, the Environmental Department Director, carried the work through the critical site visit and Council presentations of late 2025; Dackota (Natasha) York assumed emergency management duties in February 2026 following his passing; and Council Member Justina Paradise holds them today. The plan's continuity across those transitions came from the Council itself and from the USRT planning partnership.

How the community shaped the plan

Public involvement was designed around how this community actually gathers and communicates: in person at cultural events, through trusted staff, and on Facebook. The centerpiece was the community survey, opened at an information booth at the Annual Birthday Celebration on July 12, 2025, at the Powwow grounds. Fourteen surveys were completed that first day, and the Tribal Council approved extending the survey through the fall, promoted on the Tribe's Facebook page. Twenty-six residents completed it in all, about eight percent of the on-Reservation population, a strong response for a community of this size.

The survey asked which hazards residents had personally experienced, how they rated each hazard's threat, and what they most wanted protected. Its results directly shaped the risk scores, through the Risk Acceptability factor, and the priorities of the action plan. The full results are in What the community said.

On October 7, 2025, the planning team spent a full day on the Reservation with Clifton Smart, touring every hazard-relevant site: the water system and its leaking tank, the culverts along the Quinn River floodway, the firebreaks, the Brownfields sites, the old fort buildings, and the school and fire station in McDermitt, with McDermitt Fire District leadership. The visit surfaced ground truths that no database holds, from the backflow pathway behind the boil-water advisories to the incident command gap during recent fires, and those findings appear throughout the hazard profiles. The team briefed the Tribal Council at the end of the visit, presented the full survey findings and initial hazard rankings to the Council on October 14, and presented the draft risk assessment to the newly elected Council on December 9, 2025, where members pressed hardest on the drug crisis and water quality.

Coordination with governments around the Reservation

Because the Reservation spans two states and two counties, the coordination web is unusually wide, and building it was one of the plan's quiet achievements. The planning team coordinated with Humboldt County, Nevada, where Emergency Management Director Carol Lynn committed to including a Fort McDermitt annex in the next Regional Tri-County Hazard Mitigation Plan update and to including the Tribe in the county Local Emergency Planning Committee. In Oregon, the team joined the Malheur County hazard mitigation plan update process directly, participating in county planning calls with Emergency Management Director Lt. Richard Harriman, and coordinated with Anna Murphy at the Oregon Department of Emergency Management.

On the state side, the Nevada Division of Emergency Management, through State Hazard Mitigation Officer Heather Lafferty, Assistant SHMO Zach McCullough, and Tribal Liaison Aaron Thacker, offered data sharing, review support, and grant guidance, joined by FEMA Region 9 tribal coordination staff. The McDermitt Fire District, through Dale Hartley and Arthur Cavanaugh, hosted the fire station tour and continues to coordinate on apparatus and response. Neighboring Tribes reviewed shared regional hazards through the USRT planning cohort, which ran parallel plans for all four member Tribes.

The record of engagement

Review, validation, and what happens next

The draft plan went to Tribal departments and the Council for review, and this website presents the same content for community review. Comments are incorporated before the plan is submitted to FEMA Region 9 through the Nevada Division of Emergency Management. FEMA reviews against the Tribal Mitigation Plan Review Guide; on an approvable-pending-adoption finding, the Council adopts the plan by resolution and FEMA issues final approval, which starts the five-year approval clock and opens grant eligibility. The maintenance commitments that keep the plan alive after approval are in Keeping it current.

The planning area

A high-desert valley on the McDermitt Caldera

The Reservation covers about 54,277 acres of high-desert valley and uplands along the East Fork of the Quinn River, at about 4,450 feet of elevation, spanning the Nevada and Oregon line. The risk assessment covers the entire Reservation; the separate 145-acre Hog John Ranch parcel is excluded because it holds no structures or residents.

The land sits within the McDermitt Caldera, the collapsed remnant of a 16-million-year-old supervolcano whose mineral legacy shapes the community's story in two directions at once. The caldera's mercury deposits drove the Cordero-McDermitt mine that operated from 1933 to 1989 and left the contamination documented in the water quality hazard profile. The same geology now holds some of the largest known lithium deposits in North America, and proposed extraction on adjacent BLM land is one of the forces this plan watches most closely.

The East Fork Quinn River delivers roughly 20,000 acre-feet in an average year, feeding an alluvial aquifer about 150 feet deep that supplies the community wells. For much of the year the river runs small or dry; in wet years it floods. The surrounding sagebrush steppe supports the grazing, hunting, and gathering economies, with about 20,000 acres under BLM grazing permits, and the uplands hold the springs, plants, and places that carry cultural life.

Climate, today and coming

The climate is cold semi-arid high desert: about nine inches of precipitation a year, cold winters, hot dry summers, and wide daily temperature swings. The record low of minus 32 degrees F was set on December 22, 1983, and the record high of 107 degrees F on July 11, 2002, a 139-degree span that says most of what needs saying about building and living here.

Downscaled CMIP6 projections for the Reservation indicate average temperatures rising about 3 degrees F by the 2050s, with summer highs 6 to 9 degrees hotter, more days over 95 degrees, longer and deeper droughts punctuated by more intense storms, and 10 to 12 percent more annual precipitation arriving more as rain and less as snow. Every hazard profile in this plan carries a climate change section grounded in these projections.

What the projections mean on the ground

The people this plan protects

The numbers below describe the on-Reservation community the risk assessment covers. They also describe why vulnerability here is higher than raw hazard exposure alone would suggest: incomes are low, the population skews older, and the distance to services is long.

Age structure of the Reservation population

More than 49 percent of residents are 50 or older. Elders carry the culture and the language, and they carry the highest vulnerability to heat, cold, smoke, disease, and disrupted medical access.

Housing is a mix of single-family homes, many built between the 1960s and 1980s, and mobile homes, which make up about 22 percent of the stock. Overcrowding is common, insurance coverage is thin, and deferred maintenance is widespread, which raises vulnerability across nearly every hazard in this plan. There are 194 structures on the Reservation in all, every one of them within the wildfire exposure zone.

How risk was scored

One method, twelve factors, every hazard

Nineteen candidate hazards were screened using state and county plans, federal data, community input, and Tribal knowledge. Fifteen were profiled in full, after three water-related hazards were consolidated into one and two others were screened out as not applicable. Each profiled hazard was scored with the same twelve factors, so a wildfire score and a winter storm score mean the same thing.

The factors capture likelihood, trend, seven kinds of consequence, community priority, and how much mitigation can actually help. Scores were set from the historical record, federal datasets, climate projections, the community survey, and the October 2025 site visit, then reviewed with the Tribal Council. Select any factor to see how it is measured.

How the factors become a single score

Consequence factors are combined first, with Health and Safety counted twice because protecting life comes first, and the three infrastructure-related factors averaged so they carry one factor's weight together. That total is divided by its maximum possible value, then multiplied by the probability and trend factor, the mitigation potential factor, and the risk acceptability factor. The result is a score from 0 to 1.

The full ranking, highest to lowest

Select any row to open the full profile.

Two hazards are profiled without action sets

Mass Movement (0.179) and Dam Breach (0.120) scored below the 0.25 threshold. Both receive full profiles, but no dedicated mitigation actions were identified for them in this cycle: mass movement's most credible scenario, post-fire debris flow, is covered inside the wildfire and environmental degradation actions, and the dam that could breach no longer exists. If the community pursues a new Quinn River dam, the next plan update will assess that exposure and act on it.

Two candidate hazards were screened out entirely as not applicable to the planning area: avalanche, for lack of qualifying terrain and snowpack, and tornado, whose local wind risk is captured within the strong wind and derechos profile.

The scoring tool itself

The complete scoring worksheet, factor by factor and hazard by hazard, is Appendix D of the plan document. It exists so that the next planning team, five years from now, can reproduce and update every number in this ranking rather than starting over.

What we will do

46 actions across 13 hazards and community capacity

Every action names a lead department, supporting partners, a timeframe, a planning-level cost, the benefit to the Tribe, and the funding programs most likely to pay for it. Two capacity actions, the Emergency Operations Plan (CC-01) and the community emergency communications system (CC-02), serve every hazard at once and anchor Year 1.

Actions were prioritized with the STAPLEE method, scoring each against social, technical, administrative, political, legal, economic, and environmental criteria, 1 to 5 on each, so cost-effectiveness and community fit are weighed together rather than cost alone. The scored criteria for every action are shown inside it.

What the cost bands mean

The STAPLEE criteria

Select a criterion for the scale used to score it.

The five-year sequence

Timing balances urgency, dependency, and capacity: what protects life first, what needs a plan or assessment before it can be built, and what a small government can realistically carry at once.

Keeping it current

A plan that stays alive for five years

A mitigation plan only works if someone owns it after adoption. This section assigns that ownership: who monitors progress, when the plan is evaluated, how it stays woven into the Tribe's other work, and how the community stays involved.

The Tribal Administrator, supported by the Environmental Department and whoever holds emergency management duties, is responsible for plan maintenance. Department leads report action progress to the Tribal Council annually during the budget cycle, so mitigation stays attached to real money and real staff time rather than becoming a document on a shelf. A mid-term review in 2027 checks the whole action list at once, and the update process for the next five-year plan begins in 2030, a year before this plan's FEMA approval expires in 2031.

The plan is evaluated against plain questions: Are the actions moving? Have hazards, development, or Tribal priorities changed? Did a disaster occur that taught something? Has funding come through, and where did applications fall short? Answers are recorded so the 2031 update starts from evidence instead of memory. The plan is also revisited after any major disaster affecting the Reservation.

Woven into the Tribe's other work

Integration keeps this plan from competing with the Tribe's other plans and programs; each carries part of the load. The Council also committed to standing up a Fort McDermitt annex in both surrounding counties' hazard mitigation plans, so the Tribe's risk picture appears in every jurisdiction that shares its geography.

New Tribal plans, codes, and grant applications developed during the planning period will draw on this plan's risk assessment as their hazard baseline, and mitigation actions will be considered in Tribal budget decisions, department work plans, and infrastructure project scoping as a standing practice.

The community stays in the loop

Continued public participation follows the same channels that built the plan, because they are the channels this community actually uses. An information booth at the Annual Birthday Celebration each July reports progress face to face at the community's largest gathering. Updates are posted on the Tribe's Facebook page. Any community member can raise a mitigation concern with the Tribal Administrator, the Environmental Department, or any Council member at any time, and Council meetings remain open to members. The 2030 update process will open with a new community survey, repeating the baseline set in 2025 so change can be measured.

Adoption and assurances

Upon FEMA's approvable-pending-adoption finding, the Fort McDermitt Tribal Council will adopt this plan by resolution, and the signed resolution will be inserted in Appendix A. The Tribe will comply with all applicable federal statutes and regulations during any period in which it receives grant funding, including 2 CFR Parts 200 and 3002, and will amend the plan whenever necessary to reflect changes in Tribal or federal laws and statutes, as required by 44 CFR 201.7(c)(6).

What the community said

Twenty-six households, speaking plainly

The community survey opened at the Birthday Celebration on July 12, 2025 and ran through the fall. Twenty-six residents completed it, about eight percent of the on-Reservation population. Their answers set the Risk Acceptability factor in every hazard score and shaped the priorities of the action plan.

What residents reported living through is its own risk assessment. Extreme heat, water quality problems, and drought topped the list of personally experienced hazards, ahead of wildfire, which residents know mostly as smoke, near misses, and the memory of 2005. The drug crisis and water quality drew the most urgent open comments, and the Council pressed hardest on both when the results were presented.

How residents rate each hazard's threat

Average score on a 0 to 3 scale, from no threat to high threat, as charted in Appendix B of the plan document.

Community rating against the plan's risk score

The survey informed the scoring, but the two measures are independent: the community rated threat from lived experience, and the risk assessment scored twelve factors. Where they diverge is worth reading. Residents rate dam failure and hazardous materials higher than the model does, memory of the mine and the failed dam at work, and rate environmental degradation lower than the model, which weighs its slow cultural and ecological costs heavily.

What residents have personally experienced

Number of respondents, of 26, reporting personal experience with each hazard.

What residents most want protected

Respondents selected what matters most when deciding how the Tribe spends mitigation effort.

Read together, the priorities say: protect people first, then the land and the culture that make this place itself, and treat climate adaptation as part of both. The five goals in Start here follow that instruction.

Who answered

Respondent ages and housing, from the survey's demographic questions.

Respondents skewed toward working-age adults, most in single-family or multi-family homes, and more than half care for children, elders, or other dependents, which is exactly the population that carries a household through an emergency.

Records and reference

Where each federal requirement lives

FEMA reviews tribal plans against 44 CFR 201.7. This crosswalk shows where each required element appears on this site; the plan document carries the same content in its numbered sections and appendices.

Who did the work

The planning team, Tribal leadership, and agency partners. The acknowledgment list is confirmed at adoption.

Acronyms

Principal references

The plans, datasets, and studies this plan draws on. Full citations appear in Appendix C of the plan document.