WILDFIRE PLAN CRITICIZED
Governor’s blueprint prioritizes thinning of forests over efforts to better protect homes, some experts say.
A couple in Paradise, Calif., in 2018. The state plans to spend $1 billion on fire prevention.
SAN DIEGO — Robert Garant proudly showed off a collection of chain saws he’s used to maintain the nearly two acres he and his wife, Gladys, have lived on for 47 years in San Diego County’s bucolic mountain hamlet of Julian.
The retired school bus driver said pruning the oak trees and dense shrubbery around their home isn’t just an aesthetic endeavor. Maintaining what’s commonly known as defensible space, he explained, can be a matter of life and death.
“We actually saved our house by clearing that whole perimeter,” said Garant, recalling the ferocious Cedar fire in 2003 that burned down over 2,800 buildings but spared their home. “The only thing I lost was a hose.”
For many rural and suburban Californians, the approach of hotter, longer days is tinged with trauma and a persistent fear.
With a tinder-dry summer on the horizon, Gov. Gavin Newsom has released an unprecedented $1-billion blueprint for wildfire prevention, making a deal with legislators in early April to fast-track more than half of the money.
The governor’s plan calls for clearing vegetation on half a million acres a year, up from the current annual pace of about 80,000 acres. The approach stems largely from anxiety over drought and invasive beetles, which killed nearly 150 million trees last decade in the Sierra Nevada.
However, a growing chorus of wildfire experts and environmental groups say the governor’s plan shortchanges homeowners such as the Garants — prioritizing logging and other projects ill-suited to stop the type of wind-driven blazes that have repeatedly devastated communities across the state.
That’s especially true, researchers say, in Southern
California, where wildfires predominantly burn though chaparral and grasslands, blasting communities with ember storms, such as in the 2007 Harris fire in San Diego County, the 2017 Thomas fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and the 2018 Woolsey fire in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. But it also applies to the recent spate of blazes that have beset northern parts of the state, including the Tubbs, Nuns and Camp fires.
“There is a pretty big disconnect between this budget and trying to do something about the loss of lives and homes,” said Max Moritz, a widely recognized wildfire expert with the University
of California Cooperative Extension in Santa Barbara. “Those forest treatments, they don’t do barely anything to alleviate the risk to human communities.”
Newsom’s team was quick to point out that, while the state spends billions on wildfire suppression, largely through the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, it has never dedicated such resources to prevention.
As part of this effort, the state plans to launch a pilot program with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide money for home retrofits, such as sealing off eaves and installing
ember-resistant vents. The recently approved funding also provides some discretionary money that local groups will probably be able to use for programs such as defensible space assistance and free wood chipping to dispose of cleared vegetation.
“This proposed budget really does represent a paradigm shift in the state’s approach on wildfire,” said California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. “This is a quantum-leap investment in upfront action to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.”
Still, critics say Sacramento’s spending priorities are backward. While landscape-scale vegetation treatments most appropriate for forests would receive more than $500 million, the governor’s budget ponies up just $25 million for the homehardening pilot.
“This is the tragedy of those numbers,” said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires.
“We know that clearing defensible space is far, far cheaper and more efficient than the massive mechanical clearing that this proposal will fund.”