An Ounce of Prevention
Measure P Empowers the Fire Safe Council To Do More, Better
by Torrey Douglass
When Measure P passed in Mendocino County last November with 55.8% of voters in favor, supporters understood it as a long-needed, stable funding source for local fire departments. And it certainly is that. The majority of our fire departments are staffed by volunteers, so if you live in Mendocino County, it’s likely that you know someone who volunteers for a fire department, or even volunteer yourself. To survive, these departments are active in the community, fundraising and educating residents about the value of their services, visible at local events like the county fair and organizing events like toy drives and July 4th picnics. The departments are high visibility organizations with lots of community support.
But there’s another aspect to Measure P that is equally important, even if it is less well known. This is the prevention portion of the measure which funds the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC). Since 2003, MCFSC has been working to educate Mendocino County residents and provide programs to help them make their homes and property more resilient to wildfires. They’ve subsisted on grants for years, but thanks to Measure P, funding will be both consistent and predictable, allowing programs to escape the boom/bust cycle of grant funding and instead have ongoing support to expand their benefits to a much wider group of recipients.
Executive Director Scott Cratty has been working with MCFSC since January 2020. When asked about the activity of the council, he took a moment before admitting, “We do so many damn things it’s hard to cover it all.” The variety and scope of the many projects are all based on an understanding that wildfire is a reality for people living in California, and the steps we’ve taken for our homes and on our land will make the biggest difference in saving lives and property.
Scott explains, “Decades ago, it became clear that earthquakes were a part of nature in California, and we began the process of adapting how we build. It is equally clear that wildfire is also a basic part of nature here and is possibly an even larger threat to our communities. But we are just at the start of working to take the steps we need to adapt to it.”
The council’s website is packed full of helpful information about changes you can apply to your home and property so they will be more resilient when wildfires arrive. Maintaining defensible space 100 feet out from your home is an essential step. Ideally there should be nothing flammable in the 5 feet immediately surrounding the home, only thin and low vegetation from 5-30 feet, and low grass, cleared brush, limbed-up trees, and well-spaced vegetation from 30-100 feet—all healthy and well maintained with dead material removed.
Maintaining that space can take a lot of work, but fortunately there is a program to support low income, elderly, and/or disabled residents. It’s called the Defensible Space Assistance for Income-Eligible program, and interested property owners can sign up on the website (firesafemendocino.org). Accepted applicants will be assigned a team to do things like clear vegetation, clean roofs and gutters, and chip the removed vegetation.
The council is also currently offering free home assessments. These provide non-judgmental, non-binding analyses and recommendations, scheduling an assessor to come to your property and give advice on which fire safety measures should be the highest priority for you. The assessor can answer any of your questions and identify where your home is most vulnerable to wildfire. You can even organize a group of neighbors to schedule assessments together, walk through homes and properties as a group, and leave with an even better understanding of the issues and solutions.
Once your land and property have been “hardened,” the next step is to make sure the roads to and from your property are in the right shape for residents to leave and fire safety personnel to arrive. This involves clearing roadside brush, limbing-up trees so tall engines can pass through, and maintaining open flat spaces next to the road where multiple large fire trucks can park, turn around, and otherwise maneuver during a fire event.
Making the roads in your neighborhood safer for evacuating people and incoming fire fighters is a project that can be tackled cooperatively by forming a Neighborhood Fire Safe Council. There are already around 50 in the county, so check the MCFSC website to see if there’s one in your area already. If not, the site also provides guidance for starting your own. Working together allows local councils to participate in free community chipper days, attend leadership meetings, get help organizing projects, and get deals on equipment needed to get the job done.
Scott reflects on the necessity of working both individually and together to increase wildfire resilience for Mendocino County homes and properties. “It is essential for our long-term survival. The last decade has shown that the effort to suppress nature, which includes wildfire, by stomping out every fire, fails in the long run. It ultimately results in bigger, hotter, more dangerous fires. The good news is that, with education, work, and the proper support, we can reduce our risks tremendously. A recent study found that good home hardening and defensible space can reduce a home’s risk up to 75%. Getting to that point will involve a lot of steps from education about how to think about the dangers, to training and assistance with defensible space and home retrofitting, to regular systems for road clearing. We need to start on that journey now, which Measure P will enable.”
The funds provided by Measure P will not be available until 2024. For now, the council is working on specific grant-based projects, including $3.5M in CalFire funding, mostly for environmental assessments and specific fuel reduction projects. Among other projects, those grant dollars have paid for roadside fuel reduction along a substantial stretch of Orr Springs Road to allow safer passage for responders. A similar project in Willits’ Brooktrails area has also been completed.
The MCFSC is committed to applying the most recent and trusted science in the area of wildfire resilience and passing along that knowledge in ways that will provide the highest impact. With that in mind, they organized a course in March for contractors and hardware store workers throughout the county to share insights. That plastic skylight might be much cheaper than the glass version, but it will also melt quicker in the event of a wildfire, allowing dangerous embers into the home. In a similar vein, fences constructed with non-flammable materials in the zone six feet or closer to the home won’t carry fire to the structure. Educating the people who interact with home owners as they make decisions about home and land improvements will have a ripple effect and collectively make our county safer from wildfires.
Once Measure P funds do become available, they can be leveraged to attract federal dollars. Grants of that size and scope require well defined projects that have been identified, researched, and planned. That’s where Emily Tecchio comes in, whose role as the MCFSC County Coordinator includes finding and organizing those projects-in-waiting around the county, so that a plan is in place which can qualify for future federal grants when they become available. Emily shares, “It’s a big job, and with all the individuals, organizations, agencies, and governments involved with making our county more resilient to wildfire, I’ve only just begun making a dent this first year.”
Emily continues, “Measure P is the first substantial and reliable investment in fire mitigation for our county. There is so much that needs to be done! We need to clear roads for ingress/egress, create fuel breaks where firefighters can have a chance of stopping wildfires, enhance firefighting resources like water storage, but we also need to adapt the way that we as individuals and communities live.”
Scott figures there is easily $1B worth of wildfire hardening projects in the county. The Measure P funds put MCFSC on solid ground, providing a reliable foundation from which the organization can scale up. Over the next decades, the council hopes to serve as a critical resource for retrofitting our homes and neighborhoods so they can better withstand the inevitable wildfires that California endures.
All of these efforts—upgrading homes, reducing fuel loads in neighborhoods, and including everyone regardless of income—will require a lot of resources. Over the next decade, explains Emily, “MCFSC will use Measure P funds as leverage to access more state and federal dollars and continue to build out programs and services that bring our whole county closer to wildfire and climate resilience.“ Pulling together—to pass the measure and optimize the funds it provides, while also organizing our communities and hardening our properties—will move us toward a more fire safe future where we can endure the reality of California wildfire with greater grace and resilience.
Do you want to learn what fire safe upgrades you can make in a weekend? Check out the Home Hardening video series and more at FireSafeMendocino.org. Do you have an ingress/egress project in mind for your neighborhood? Send Emily an email: emily@firesafemendocino.org. Let’s get to work!
Photo by Ross Stone and courtesy of Unsplash
