Fire Safety Town Hall
The Fire Safety Town Hall will be from 6:00-8:00 pm on Monday, May 19 at the Little Theater in building 700, the Lowery Building, on the Ukiah campus of Mendocino College. The event is free, but registration is requested.
An upcoming Fire Safety Town Hall will cover a range of relevant topics for Mendocino County residents, from the science of home-hardening and prescribed burns to regulatory changes. “This Town Hall is based on the most up-to-date information, post-LA fires,” according to First District Supervisor Madeline Cline, who will kick off the meeting and introduce the speakers. The goal, she says, “is to start on the home end. We’ll be discussing what each of us can do in our homes, and then moving out: what can we do at a neighborhood level, a community level, and then some of the things that are happening region-wide.”
Anderson Valley Fire Department Prescribed Burn
Michael Jones, the UC Cooperative Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma counties, will offer a presentation about using prescribed burns as a stewardship tool. In addition to being a founding member of the Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association, Jones has been conducting experiments with prescribed burns in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest, which is mostly a redwood landscape. Fire, he contends, is a vital part of California’s ecosystem, and it is well past time to reintroduce it as a management strategy.
Brandon Gunn, CAL FIRE’s Mendocino Unit Chief, will update attendees on his work in the county and unit plans as summer approaches. Scott Cratty, the Executive Director of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, will share information about how neighborhoods can work together to promote fire resistance.
Another speaker will be Yana Valachovic, the forest advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties. She is also the administrator for the UC Cooperative Extension programs in both counties, where she works with the UC Fire Network on how to make people’s homes less flammable. She recently visited Los Angeles, where she was reminded that fire will burn in any type of vegetation, including carefully curated landscapes in urban areas. “So much of our orientation is around fire in forests, and that it’s forest fire that’s going to impact our communities,” she reflected. “The challenge is, how do we keep it out of our communities?”
Much of the answer is reducing opportunities for wind-driven embers to do damage. These embers, she says, “are a force to be reckoned with. They can find all the little weaknesses in our buildings. They come in through the cat and dog doors. They come in by the open skylight, the garage door that doesn’t seal very well. They penetrate our vents. They land in the debris that collects at the bases of our walls, and the woody vegetation and the wood mulch that we have within the first five feet of our houses.
Once you get ignition adjacent to your building, then you have direct flame contact. Then fire finds a way into that building, which is so perfectly cured and ready to burn,” giving off radiant heat. The radiant heat can then find its way into the neighbor’s houses or outbuildings. More embers are created by the burning buildings, which creates what Valachovic calls “a contagion effect.”
A wooden fence, too, can act as a fuse, leading directly to a structure. A metal gate or panel between the building and the fence can disconnect the flame’s pathway. Another major fire-resistant component of any home is a good roof, which is a high-dollar improvement. But ember-resistant vents, with eighth-inch or smaller mesh, can be a DIY project for any enterprising homeowner with a pair of good shears and a roll of mesh from the hardware store. “While the (standard) quarter-inch screen keeps out rodents and other critters,” Valachovic says, it leaves plenty of space for an ember to slip into a home and become a fire. “A pair of metal shears and a staple gun can do a tremendous amount of good,” she advises.
She’s not merciful about beloved flowering plants nestled up against the house. “We’ve experienced unprecedented fire exposure,” she points out. “Responding to this moment, in my mind, means you can’t do business as usual anymore. What we’ve been doing isn’t necessarily producing a different outcome…Fire adaptation takes adaptation,” which means getting serious about home-hardening and defensible space.
Even if a homeowner is fortunate enough to have fire insurance, the recovery from losing a home takes years. Many rural landowners in Mendocino County have lost insurance. Some have had their rates double or triple. In an initiative called Safer From Wildfires, California’s Department of Insurance has agreed to allow insurance companies to use catastrophic models to inform their evaluation of fire risk, rather than relying on historical conditions. This means that the companies can use the risk of climate change and its accompanying disasters to determine their rates.
In return, insurance companies must take property owners’ efforts towards improving fire resilience into account. Insurers are also being required to make their decisions more transparent. Valachovic is part of a group that is working to develop a public wildfire catastrophe model at Cal Poly Humboldt, and plans to speak about Safer from Wildfires at the Town Hall. At the moment, her advice to homeowners includes raising their deductibles and carefully documenting the efforts they have made towards improving fire resistance. As of 2019, AB 38, sponsored by former Assemblyman Jim Wood, requires that residential property sales in high or very high fire-hazard severity areas include disclosures about compliance with defensible space regulations.
“We’re in an awkward time,” she acknowledges. “But I think there’s a lot of reason for hope in this space,” as fire becomes more understandable and communities learn how to adapt.
The Fire Safety Town Hall will be from 6:00-8:00 pm on Monday, May 19 at the Little Theater in building 700, the Lowery Building, on the Ukiah campus of Mendocino College. It is sponsored by the UC Cooperative Extension, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, and CAL FIRE. The event is free, but registration is requested. The link is available on the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council and the Hopland Municipal Advisory Council’s Facebook pages.
