Newest Neighborhood Fire Safe Council Gets Right to Work
Mendocino County’s newest Neighborhood Fire Safe Council is in one of the North County’s most iconic and fire-prone neighborhoods. The Golden Rule Mobile Village is within Ridgewood Ranch, which is south of Willits and is known for its native and exotic wildlife, a famous racehorse, and a slow-moving miniature donkey.
Insurers know it as a neighborhood to avoid, however, for fire-insurance purposes, leaving residents of the mobile and manufactured home park on the property, who are all over age 55, to mostly fend for themselves to find insurance with the FAIR plan, California’s pricey home insurance of last resort.
So some Golden Rule Village residents have organized to start protecting their community from fire with improved defensible space, education, and a few home-hardening measures. Homeowner Kate Carter went to a two-day CAL FIRE training, and knew exactly what she wanted to do.
“In March, I attended the defensible-space assessor training offered by CAL FIRE,” she recalled. “I became acutely aware of how my present location, and the mobile home park where I live, is susceptible to wildfire. Following that training, I was gung-ho to have defensible-space assessments for all my neighbors in the Golden Rule Mobile Village,” which consists of just under 100 units with one or two residents each.
“What I appreciated most about that training,” Carter continued, “was the importance of preventing fire starts from embers. Those embers will come through the air – a mile or more. They are like matches dropping from the sky, falling into dead vegetation or gutters that are clogged. My big focus for this village is, if everybody can just look around their property and think, if a match fell into that pile of dry grass or leaves, would it start a fire? In this mobile home park, we are all in close proximity to each other. So we’re all dependent on one another to do the minimal amount of cleanup to protect our homes as well as our neighbors.”
By late May, a half-dozen neighbors had formed the Golden Rule Village Fire Safe Council, in hopes of preventing fires altogether, or minimizing the damage if a fire does start. Forming a Neighborhood Fire Safe Council gives small organizations access to assistance with fire-resiliency projects. That can include help with organizing, or awarding Micro-Grants for fire-safety projects including emergency water systems, reflective road signs, or communication systems. Sometimes it’s as simple as having a professional crew come out and pitch in to do a few hours of vegetation management on a steep hillside.
By mid-July, Carter and her neighbor Bill Pearce were relaxing in her living room as the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC) crew did just that. MCFSC staff had been asked to help reduce the fuel load on a steep slope just between temporary mobile home parking and the more permanently rooted park community above, to provide a fuel break between the two locations. The crew had just finished weed-whacking, and thinning trees and brush on the steep hillside, and were feeding the limbs into a chipper. Carter and Pearce had pitched in as volunteers, though Pearce had not had an action-packed day. “I just had a knee replacement,” he explained. “But I thought, I gotta participate as long as I can. I gave my cane up about a week ago, so I’m still relearning how to walk.” They are more able-bodied than many of their more elderly neighbors, but they were still pleased to leave the heavy lifting to younger people with strong backs, good knees, and well-oiled chainsaws.
Almost half of California’s mobile homes are located in high to extreme fire-hazard severity zones, and about half of their residents are very low-income. The housing is high-density, and many of the manufactured homes do not meet modern fire-safety standards. “We have vinyl windows,” Carter noted. Though the residents are unlikely to take on extensive home-hardening measures, the new fire safe council hopes to encourage a trend of ember-resistant vents and clean roof gutters. Water is also a major consideration in drought-prone California, which must be taken into account when landscaping. At Golden Rule Village, water is limited during the summer. Plants near homes on small lots die and dry into kindling.
The Golden Rule Mobile Village is located on property owned by Ridgewood Ranch. One famous former resident is the racehorse Seabiscuit, who is also the namesake of the Seabiscuit Therapeutic Riding Center. One beloved resident of the Riding Center is the miniature donkey Muffin, a fire refugee who joined the program after losing his home in Potter Valley during the 2017 wildfire. According to Pearce, “Muffin is famous. People want to be the donkey-walker. There will be people with disabilities who come in and just walk with Muffin as a therapeutic event. It’s become very popular. Muffin is part of the deal here.”
The property is protected by conservation easements and provides habitat to wildlife, sheep, and cattle. The deer are especially bold. “Every morning when I get up, I’m looking at the deer,” Carter reported. “They actually live under my decking, and they birth under there, so I get to see those fawns right out the womb. If a wildfire came through here, it would be such a loss of wildlife. It would be so sad.”
It would also be impossible to rebuild. Like many rural Californians, Carter lost her private insurance and is now on the California FAIR plan. She estimates the insurance premiums are about triple what she was paying her former company. Pearce added that it’s also not enough to cover the disasters that have become all too common. “Most of us don’t have enough insurance to actually replace the structure,” he explained. “They’ll basically pay what we paid for it, but prices have gone up. You’re not going to be able to replace this. If the park burns, it’s a big tragedy. Nobody’s coming back. So it makes sense to protect it right now.”
