When the Feliz Fire came, Feliz Creek neighbors knew what to do
Article Written by Roger Coryell as part of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council’s public information campaign.
Bernadette Byrne keeps her evacuation list on an old ironing board by her back door. Open the board and the list is there: what to pack, what to do to the house, how to leave.
Byrne wasn't home when the Feliz Fire started on Aug. 1. Some of her neighbors were, and sheriff's deputies came to their doors.
"It was gratifying to hear from those that were in the fire's path that had the sheriff's department knocking on their door saying, leave now, feeling like they had a sense of what they needed to do to get out at that moment," she said.
The fire started at about 3:40 p.m. on Feliz Creek Road outside Hopland and burned 872 acres, according to CAL FIRE's Mendocino Unit. CAL FIRE lists it as extinguished Aug. 10.
Byrne has spent almost two years organizing her neighborhood as a Firewise Community, working with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC). Firewise USA is a national program, run by the National Fire Protection Association, that recognizes neighborhoods working together to cut their wildfire risk. To qualify, a neighborhood forms a committee, assesses its wildfire risk and commits to a three-year action plan.
Feliz Creek was a single large cattle ranch until the early 1980s, when the land was subdivided and sold to homeowners, according to the community's Firewise listing on the MCFSC website. Most of its houses went up around the 1990s. The listing puts the neighborhood in a zone CAL FIRE rates as very high fire hazard.
"There's been so many productive meetings where we have had the opportunity to gather our community together to talk about fire and to talk about how to prepare for fire, to talk about what to do in the case of fire," Byrne said.
She said the meetings got neighbors "thinking about the fact that we live in this wildfire environment," and about how to manage their own homes and the neighborhood as a whole.
Her own plan includes evacuation tags at the end of the driveway that tell the sheriff's office or fire department the household has left, with a cell phone number, and leaving the lights on in the house.
Byrne said the point of going over those steps again and again is that people stop needing to look them up. In an emergency, she said, "your brain kind of flat lines and you're in a total fight or flight." That is when it helps to "have these things that you don't have to try and recall."
When it comes time to go, she said, what matters most is getting yourself out safely, along with pets or relatives and a few important documents.
Much of the work comes long before a fire, in the yard.
"We live out in the country, so there's a huge amount of weed whacking and weed whacking and weed whacking and weed whacking," she said. "It never, never stops."
From the MCFSC meetings, neighbors learned to move firewood and other things that burn away from their houses, and to replace decorative tan bark with decomposed granite.
Byrne is replacing the soffits and vents on her house with fire-safe vents to keep embers out.
"I did not think about the vents that are up under my eaves as a potential liability in the case of fire, and now I know that they need to be replaced with these fire-safe mesh vents so that embers can't get into the attic," she said.
Photo by Billy Carmen
Her neighbors know these steps too, she said, from the meetings and from MCFSC handouts and its website. She called the handouts "just really bullet points, here's what you need to do."
"I feel like we all have a little bit more confidence in our home's ability to withstand a fire," she said.
The neighborhood has one main road in and out. Neighbors worked with landowners on an emergency-only evacuation route. "A number of our neighbors did use it," she said of the Feliz Fire.
Byrne spoke with Scott Cratty, MCFSC's executive director, a few weeks after the fire.
"I had no idea what it would take to become a Firewise Community," she said.
"It was a little daunting to think that just like myself could pull this off, but I've got my community support, and with you guys' leadership, it's just a matter of doing the right work at the right times and submitting the paperwork and then gathering the community," she told Cratty.
"Our community has been really great," she said. "They're really all in on this."
To learn more about starting a Firewise Community, with help from the MCFSC, visit https://www.firesafemendocino.org/start-a-firewise-community.
