How to sign up for a Firesmart advanced home assessment

The NWT is running a free program that sends an expert to comprehensively assess your property for wildfire risk and help devise ways to address issues.

The Firesmart advanced home assessment program is now taking applications for assessors to stop by your home between May and October 2025. Here’s the form to sign up.

Each assessment takes around an hour to 90 minutes, the NWT government says. At the end, you get a report designed to help you better defend your property against a wildfire.

“Whether you’ve got a home, a cabin accessible by road or a business, we want to connect people with Firesmart experts,” said NWT Fire’s Mike Westwick, “and come up with a plan find vulnerabilities and address them together.”

Depending on your community, you’ll either receive help from the territorial wildland fire team or your local fire department.

Not all local fire departments have had the training yet. Westwick said the GNWT is working to fill in those gaps, but anyone in any community can get help one way or another at no cost.

“With a limited amount of time, we need to be strategic,” he said.

“We’re out advertising pretty heavily for this program to gauge interest across the territory and set our engagement plans for the summer, so we really strongly encourage folks to request an assessment.

“Our folks will follow up with you to arrange it. The goal is to spread the word, educate folks, and give people tangible steps they can take [to] really be prepared before wildfires might happen in their backyard.”

NWT Fire has not yet issued its forecast for the initial months of the 2025 season. Both 2023 and 2024 were severe wildfire summers, with 2023 being the worst on record for the territory.

An initial assessment at the federal level has suggested officials expect “normal fire activity” across the country, in broad terms, over the next couple of months. Recent NWT wildfire seasons have started in late April or May.

You can sign up for an assessment now but they won’t start until May. Westwick said snow needs to be off the ground for a property to be effectively assessed.

“You need to have the snow clear largely because you’re assessing things like the skirting on people’s homes, their roofs, things like that – whether there’s debris present, whether there are little cracks and gaps where embers can enter,” he said.

Westwick added that people who rent their homes can still apply for an assessment.

He said NWT Fire had heard from tenants of public housing, for example, who felt unable to “effect change within their properties.”

“The reality is a lot of the stuff that makes your place more wildfire-resilient actually happens in your yard, and a significant amount of the assessment does focus on the yard,” Westwick said.

“We do encourage folks to share any reports with their landlords, whether that be private or public landlords, for tips on upgrading their structures as well.”