Sonoma County better prepared for fire in the wildland urban interface

Up on Mark West Springs Road, just past the sign for Mark West Springs Lodge, you’ll find the intersection of Porter Creek Road and Leslie Road. Pulling over, you’ll see the overgrowth of oak trees braiding itself among the cords spewing from a dilapidated power pole. You’ll see the dead grass covering the meadows behind the chipped white fences. And you’ll notice the dried fuel skirting up and down the tight curves of the Mark Springs corridor hugging you at the east and west sides.

It’s a spot located smack in the middle of Tubbs Fire scar and, according to Sonoma County Fire Chief Mark Heine it looks like it’s still on fire.

“It’s a hot spot for sure,” said Sonoma County Fire Chief Mark Heine on a Friday morning. “There’s dead fuel everywhere. It wouldn’t carry like the Tubbs did, but it would carry.”

The intersection is an indicator of vegetation in Sonoma County right now. There’s dead fuel, and a lot of it. However, despite these hot spots, the County of Sonoma, which saw the Tubbs, Nuns and Atlas fires rip through this very area, has since invested millions into fire awareness, prevention and preparedness.

“We are so much more proactive now than we used to be,” Heine said.

The proactive readiness comes at all levels, Heine said. thanks to a level of collaboration between fire agencies, local and state governments and the community that’s never been seen before.

“The collaboration we’ve seen has been the biggest change next to being exceptionally proactive,” Heine said.

Fifth District Supervisor Lynda Hopkins agreed. She especially cited the collaboration and interest among constituents as an integral piece for establishing an important network for fire prevention in the county’s wildland urban interface, known as WUI (pronounced woo-ee), for short.

The WUI is a state-established designation for land in which housing density is more than 6.17 houses per square kilometer within vegetation cover of more than 50%. In California, 11.2 million people -- 1/4 of them -- live in the WUI, comprising 450 million houses. Here in Sonoma County, a third of all the houses are in the WUI, but the geographical area covers most of the county.

“We have so much in the WUI,” Hopkins said. “It is so extensive and there’s so much open space.”

A lot of the land in the WUI is under conservation, thanks to organizations like the Pepperwood Preserve, Sonoma County Ag & Open Space and Sonoma County Regional Parks. But, as Hopkins points out, a lot of the WUI is highly parcelized, posing unique challenges for fire prevention.

That’s one of the reasons there are intersections like Heine’s hotspot on Porter Creek Road.

“We can’t just snap our fingers and implement one strategy across tens of thousands of acres of land,” Hopkins said. “You have to work through the challenge of a diversity of property owners with varying interests and means. At the end of the day, you’re only as safe as your neighbor and if your neighbor doesn’t do the same thing, how do you hold them accountable without taking a punitive approach?”

Community-led fire prevention

The county thinks it has an answer with SoCoAdapts. As Caerleon Safford, Fire Inspector with the County of Sonoma explains, it’s the carrot rather than the stick approach to fire prevention in the WUI. Within SoCoAdapts, the county identified roughly a dozen project areas in which inspectors from the county will work with home owners to focus on defensive space and home hardening. To help homeowners actually do the work, the county may provide up to $10,700 in cost-sharing incentives to complete high-priority risk reduction projects.

“This is the future,” Safford said. “This is where we are going.”

SoCoAdapts is a project that mirrors the county’s CWPP, or community wildfire protection plan. The CWPP -- which is basically a prioritized list of projects proposed by the community to protect it from fire -- empowers the county to direct grant funding to projects that are basically plug-and-play.

“These projects have been vetted and a lot of them are ready to go,” Hopkins said. “They just need funding.”

Many communities have already benefited from the CWPP process and funding, whether it come as a windfall from PG&E or the federal government. Rio Nido, Guernewood and Occidental -- communities located in Hopkins’ heavily wooded Fifth District -- have each improved their areas with projects like invasive species removal and creating a fire buffer or calming zone.

The community’s efforts to the surrounding land are just one part of the puzzle, Safford and Heine stress.

“You have to have good, defensible space so your home has a fighting chance and so I can engage firefighters in a safe manner,” Heine said.

Because that’s the thing about the WUI: for firefighters, life and structures are first priority; when both are intermixed with vegetation, fires have a tendency to grow more intense.

“The best way to put fires out is to defend structures,” Heine said. “But the threat of big fires is increasing because we keep building in vegetation.”

Safford understands that home hardening and creating defensive space can be overwhelming.

“I get it. I’ve been doing it to my own place for 20 years,” Safford said. “At the end of the day it can be hard to think of our home as the risk. But really, you just have to start small.”

Stafford suggests focusing first on the zero-to-five-foot zone first.

“Look at vegetation but look at the stuff laying around. Look at the bags of cat litter and the tools,” Stafford said. “What’s laying around? We have a blind spot for our stuff.”

A mental exercise Safford recommends:

“If you took a hot coal with tongs around your house and then set the blow dryer to it, imagine to yourself what would happen to the embers coming from that hot coal,” Stafford said. “Are they reaching anything around your house?”

If they are, she says, you’re in trouble.

“My guess is a significant number of house fires begin in the zero-to-five foot zone,” Stafford said.

While regulations now require houses in California to be fitted with 1/8-inch slatted vents (as opposed to 1/4-inch), they don’t require retrofitting. Nevertheless, Stafford also suggests prioritizing replacing attic vents.

“I’d say more than 80% of wildfire ignitions are caused by something the size of a pea and it blew on something near the home or into the vents,” Safford said. “It happens all the time.”

Over time, Stafford also recommends double-paned glass windows and refurbishing decks with noncombustible materials.

“It’s expensive but it can be done and in the end, it’s worth it,” Stafford said.

Is it enough?

Heine knows better than to let his guard down, but he acknowledges that Sonoma County has had a light fire summer so far.

“There’s been a delay in the peak of fire season. We’ve got a ways to go yet,” Heine said. “Fire season is year-round now. September, October and November are going to be serious and we are going to need to be prepared.”

Heine looks at the forests careening up the east and west sides of the county and can’t help but notice examples of their waning health.

“At first blush, in Monte Rio and Guerneville you think the forests look great,” Heine said. “But you get close up and walk through them and you start to notice the impacts of the drought. The forest is exceptionally dry.”

The St. Helena area, where dead and dying fuel has collapsed into exhausted piles, is no better, Heine remarked.

“There’s just piles and piles,” Heine said.

For the fire agency’s part, Heine said they’re ready. On Red Flag days, county fire agencies staff up and are positioned at critical areas throughout the county.

Heine stressed that citizens can continue to do their part to be ready, too.

“Be signed up to receive those alerts,” he said.

A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Caerleon Safford as Caerleon Stafford. The Gazette regrets the error.