At around 22.00 in the evening of Monday January 27, 2014, sparks from crashing low voltage power lines put fire to dry grass between two holiday homes in the tiny coastal community of Uran in Flatanger, central Norway. Due to strong winds the fire spread rapidly and eventually set an area of 15 square kilometers on fire. Within 12 hours, 63 buildings burnt down. Despite substantial material losses, the handling of the fire has in the aftermath been considered quite successful, perhaps first of all because no lives were lost. This success has been ascribed the efforts of the local community in fighting the fire, and the importance of people’s local knowledge, especially in the early phase of the fire.
The importance of local knowledges and practices is increasingly acknowledged in relation to natural hazards much due to the focus now put on the role of community resilience and adaptive capacities in local communities to meet the challenges of climate and environmental changes. This points not only to the fact that individuals and local communities are encouraged and indeed expected to take more responsibility for their own coping capacities but also that a variety of knowledges must be co-produced in order to meet the expectations. Also in fire management, the concept of local knowledge has been recognized as important, but has at the same time been described as a concept that often remains misunderstood, vague and contested. We argue that what local knowledge is really about, is to a large extent an empirical question, as local knowledge is a practice which requires attention to what people are doing during a crisis, and how they explain and justify their actions in hindsight. Against the investigation of the local community’s handling of the fire, i.e. what local knowledge allowed for, we discuss the potential for and importance of incorporating and recognising such knowledge in within DRR.