Residents get wiser to prevent wildfires
Federal program coaches communities at risk
The harsh reality of fireprone California has caused a kind of awakening in Jackson Oaks, a woodsy hillside community in Santa Clara County surrounded by dry oakdotted grasslands.
Warm winds blow up a steep, dry canyon almost every afternoon, a situation that has infused residents of the 505 ranchstyle homes on the east side of Morgan Hill with a foreboding that didn’t exist before wildfires raged across California over the past few years.
The tales of fiery destruction and death have transformed the picturesque view from Jackson Oaks toward Anderson Lake into an alarming panorama of fuel. Hundreds of communities across California are confronting the same situation as they try to save their neighborhoods from the increasingly ominous forces of nature.
“We all know the danger. Every year there is a brush fire somewhere around here,” said Jim Realini, president of the Jackson Oaks homeowners association. The residents “saw the news and they heard the stories, and we told everybody, ‘We live in one of those areas.’ Ev
erybody is much more sensitized this year.”
Jackson Oaks is one of 222 communities in California that are doing something about it. The residents have joined Firewise, a federal program that helps neighborhoods adjacent to wilderness — areas labeled “wildlandurban interface” — prepare for wildfires.
The program, which encourages residents to work together on fire prevention projects, has been growing steadily in California and spiked after November’s Camp Fire destroyed 14,000 homes and killed 85 people in the Butte County town of Paradise. Over the past year, 81 California neighborhoods and communities have joined the program, a 57% increase in one year.
“We’ve really seen huge growth,” said Michele Steinberg, the wildfire division director for the National Fire Protection Association of Massachusetts, which started Firewise in 12 communities in 2002. There are now 1,500 participants across the country.
“It’s really sad that it takes these kinds of disasters to happen for people to take action, but I think finally people are starting to get it and say, ‘Yes, this is happening. I’m going to do something about it,’ ” she said.
Firewise, which is administered by a consortium of wildland fire organizations and federal agencies, recognizes and rewards neighborhood groups when they complete a sixstep program. Members are required to form committees, perform wildfire risk assessments, develop action and evacuation plans for residents, and deploy volunteers to clear brush and work on other projects to thwart fire.
The program offers annual grants, provided by the fire protection association with support from insurance companies, to participating homeowners associations and jurisdictions. Many insurance companies also give 5% discounts to homeowners involved in Firewise.
Jackson Oaks joined the program four years ago, and Realini has since persuaded the adjacent association, Holiday Lakes Estates, to join, which means the residents of about 1,100 dwellings in the hills above Morgan Hill are now participating. He said his homeowners association, which holds two work parties a year, receives an annual $500 grant that it uses for fire prevention work.
“We typically have 20 to 22 people working, and there are a lot of seniors,” said Marian Sacco, vice president of the homeowners association and leader of the Firewise program. She said the neighborhood averages 2,400 volunteer hours a year weedwhacking and cleaning debris on vacant land, including a large median strip along the main roadway.
Realini drove around the neighborhood recently to show off the choppedup juniper bushes, which he referred to as “turpentine torches,” piled up around the neighborhood waiting to be hauled away. As many as 70% of the homeowners have cut down the fireprone bushes, which were used as landscaping when the area was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, after the fire marshal declared them a hazard.
Morgan Hill is one of many places in California where fire is a constant danger. About 5 million homes statewide have been built along the wildlandurban interface, meaning they butt up against volatile open space and often overlook chimneylike canyons.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has designated 189 communities housing nearly 3 million people “very high fire hazard severity zones.” They include big houses that dot the hills and jut out of wildland areas throughout the East Bay hills and are in every county from Marin to Santa Clara.
At least 5,000 homes in the hills of Lafayette and Walnut Creek are in “priority hazard zones,” fire officials have said. At least 5,000 more cover fireprone ridges and hillsides in the Oakland and Berkeley hills.
Strict state fire codes apply in highhazard zones in many cities and counties. They include restrictions on building materials and requirements for fireresistant landscaping. Road widths of at least 22 feet, allowing fire engines to maneuver while residents flee, have become common in new hillside neighborhoods.
Cal Fire has done what it can to improve the situation, requiring 100 feet of “defensible space” — essentially a firebreak — around homes, but the rule can be difficult to enforce.
The Firewise progam, which incorporates state and local regulations as well as best practices from fire safety experts, has grown in popularity everywhere, but it has made major inroads in Marin County, where thousands of homes are nestled in the hills and canyons next to Mount Tamalpais.
Fire scientists have long pegged Marin, with its narrow, winding roads and woodsy hillside estates, as the next likely candidate for a disastrous fire. That includes wooded land in and around Mill Valley, which many believe is the most dangerous place in Marin, and 251 square miles of forested and oakdotted unincorporated territory — more than five times the size of San Francisco.
Todd Lando, executive coordinator of FireSafe Marin, a nonprofit that helps homeowners reduce fire hazards, said Marin County has 43 recognized Firewise neighborhoods, including a dozen in Mill Valley. That’s more than any other county in the state, he said.
Marin County has not had a major wildfire since fall 1995, when a smoldering campfire lit by some high school students got out of control on Mount Vision in the Point Reyes National Seashore, blackening 12,000 acres and destroying 45 homes.
Still, Lando said, there is good reason to be concerned. A huge fire in 1929 burned across Mount Tamalpais into Mill Valley, and an even bigger fire hit in September 1923, scorching 50,000 acres from Novato to Bolinas. That fire was larger than the Tubbs Fire, which raged through Napa and Sonoma counties in 2017, killing 22 people and destroying thousands of homes in Santa Rosa.
“If that fire hit today, we would be looking at 5,000 to 8,000 homes burning,” Lando said. “It’s been almost 100 years of vegetation growth, with very few fires since then. This history with fires is history that repeats itself, so we have every reason to believe that fire can happen today.”
Another area of intensive focus is in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the number of homes built in highfirethreat areas has been growing steadily for decades.
Kristen Cook, who heads the Firewise council in You Bet, a former Gold Rush town in Nevada County, said the program grew from zero to 600 participants after she began passing out flyers in February reading, “Are you ready for wildfire? You Bet.”
The main concern in the wooded community is the narrow 9milelong road that winds through the forest and is the only way in and out. Cook is working with residents to make sure they have “go bags” with clothes, water, radios, tools and medical kits ready, and to park their cars facing outward, with at least a half tank of gas.
“In the past, a red flag day meant it was hot so let’s go to the river,” Cook said. “The Camp Fire has created an awareness about what a red flag warning really means.”
Back in Jackson Oaks, Realini stopped his car on a bluff overlooking the vast goldcolored canyon and the distant reservoir and gestured northward, where officials say the biggest fire danger exists. He was on a winding mountain road, one of two streets in and out of Jackson Oaks. A recent fire safety study estimated it would take residents 2½ hours to get out if everyone left at the same time.
“In the afternoon, from about 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., we get a north wind, and that’s where most fires come from,” Realini said, taking in the view. “We all know the danger now, and we’ve got a lot left to do.”