Fires underscore dry season dangers
Sempervirens Fund's webinar explores benefits of prescribed burns
BOULDER CREEK >> Santa Cruz was hit with at least two vegetation fires over the Memorial Day weekend as public officials warn of cumulative drought impacts on the area and offer tips to prepare for fire season.
On Monday, fire agencies rushed to respond to a hard-toreach timber fire outside of Boulder Creek, ultimately containing the blaze to about 1.5 acres.
To battle the blaze, Cal Fire called in two helicopters, a spotter plane and two air tankers, along with neighboring fire agencies, to respond shortly after 3:30 p.m. to the slow-moving “Fern Fire” on the hill above Fern Drive, north of Boulder Creek. According to Cal Fire, with light winds and humidity at 50%, fire fighting conditions were favorable and no structures were threatened.
Elsewhere in the county a day earlier, firefighters were also called to a fire that had spread. Cal Fire and partner agencies were called around 4 p.m. Sunday to battle a blaze that originated at an abandoned Davenport home on the upland side of Highway 1 near the former cement plant. Approximately a quarter of an acre of vegetation around the home was caught in the flames. According to Cal Fire officials, there were no injuries and the fire's cause remained under investigation.
The holiday weekend fires came just ahead of the Sempervirens Fund's public webinar series Tuesday afternoon, with its latest episode exploring the attimes controversial idea of prescribed fire. The land trust agency touted prescribed fire as “one of the best tools to promote ecological and community resilience in California,” noting the presence of ongoing legislative barriers to the practice's widespread use statewide. Featured guest speaker Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, took a wider perspective on the benefits of controlled burns and said the practice will require a grassroots push by property owners.
“When we work on prescribed fire issues, we're not just working to prevent future wildfire, we're really working to restore fire as a process, as a cultural tradition and to preserve a lot of the biodiversity that we have on our landscape which is a direct result of the fires,” Quinn-Davidson said.
Sempervirens Fund Executive Director Sara Barth said prescribed fires cannot remove the state's exposure to wildfire. Rather, she said, the practice is about shaping the kinds of fire that occur and limiting their extremes.
“I think, if we had any doubts, we've learned in the last decade that we can't prevent wildfires,”
Barth said. “It is unavoidable in California and probably in much of the Western United States, across ecosystems — not just forests. The work that you're talking about is about restoring fire, whether it's prescribed fire or whether it's wildfire that starts and is allowed to continue to burn, as an alternative to doing nothing to the wildfire
that will inevitably come and be catastrophic.”
Statewide, California has faced an unusually early start to fire season amidst an ongoing drought and historically low rainfall and reservoir levels, according to Cal Fire. Warmer spring and summer temperatures, reduced snowpack and earlier spring snowmelt, according to the agency, are making forests increasingly more susceptible to severe wildfire.
In April, Cal Fire officials
suspended all Santa Cruz County burn permits for outdoor residential burning. Last month, it issued messaging urging residents to prepare their homes and property for wildfire dangers by creating defensible space and installing home hardening retrofits. The agency's basic tips include clearing dead and or dying vegetation from within 100 feet of structures, planting landscape with fire-resistant plants and non-flammable ground cover and finding alternative ways to
dispose of landscape debris, such as chipping or hauling it to a biomass energy or green waste facility.
“With the incoming heat and no foreseeable rainfall we need to now stop residential burns for the fire season, but urge residents to continue their fire season preparation by other means,” Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit Chief Nate Armstrong said.
Additional wildfire prevention and response tips are available online at Cal Fire's ReadyForWildfire.org.