Californians urged to prepare now for fire season. 'It starts at home'

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Californians must fortify their homes against the ongoing threat of wildfire home by home, neighbor by neighbor and community by community.

That’s the message state and local fire authorities are working to impress upon residents, even with the calendar only freshly flipped to spring.

“We’ve got to double down on the efforts in wildfire mitigation. That starts at home,” California State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant told reporters Friday. “We need homeowners in El Dorado County and across the state to ensure they’ve got defensible space. Now is the time before things dry out further.

“The truth is we’re not going to respond our way out of this crisis,” Berlant continued as he spoke in Placerville, where state, Cal Fire and federal officials gathered at a roundtable to share fire prevention strategy and where El Dorado County launched its wildfire awareness season campaign Friday. The theme: “Hope is not a strategy. Be prepared.”

El Dorado leaders know this all too well. The county is still healing from the scars of 2021’s Caldor Fire, the inferno that blackened more than 221,000 acres and was fed by decades of dry timber and brush that hadn’t seen fire activity since the Second World War.

“We know we’ve experienced devastating wildfire in El Dorado County over the last several decades,” said Ken Pimlott, chair of the El Dorado County Wildfire Preparedness and Resilience Coordination Group. “The next one we know is coming, we just don’t know when..”

Crisis is ‘immense.’ What can be done?

California is “in an immense wildfire crisis that is only going to get worse here in California,” Berlant said. “We have to have a strategy that’s consistent.”

That strategy has three planks:

▪ Community hardening: Creating defensible space including what Cal Fire calls “Zone Zero,” clearing the first 5 feet around homes of brush, shrubs or debris; and home hardening, retrofitting homes with fire- and ember-resistant materials. The El Dorado County Fire Safe Council has programs available to help residents remove tree hazards and clear defensible space.

▪ Forest management: “We have to ensure that our forests are healthy, that our ecosystems are restored. Our forests in California are overgrown, they are drought-stricken in many areas,” Berlant said.

▪ Wildfire response: “We have made significant investments in our resources, our firefighters, our fire engines, replacement of our helicopter fleet and adding adding additional helicopters,” Berlant said. “More resources, more technology, more firefighters on the ground.”

The strategy follows Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order in March declaring a state of emergency to safeguard communities from catastrophic wildfire ahead of peak fire season, including increased forest management and community hardening.

Homeowners face insurance coverage woes

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, the state’s Department of Insurance is working to coax insurers back to California and provide relief for beleaguered homeowners.

“Wildfire safety is at the center of everything we’re talking about today,” said deputy state insurance commissioner Michael Soller at Friday’s news conference. “We know that folks are afraid. Are they going to be able to get insurance? Are they going to be able to afford insurance and are they going to be able to protect their homes? Our goal at the Department of Insurance is to do what needs to be done in El Dorado County to bring insurance companies back.”

The fire year has already been a busy and destructive one in California, even aside the hurricane-force firestorms that devastated Los Angeles at the dawn of the new year. Cal Fire crews had responded to more than 600 fires statewide as of Friday, Berlant said.

In a state where perennial fire season has reached a crisis point for homeowners, the firefighters called to protect them and the insurers paid to cover their ever-mounting losses, wildfire experts are paying close attention.

Recent weather is helping

From the Bay Area to the Tahoe basin, Northern California caught a break. Recent rainfall and snowmaking storms stocked the snowpack ahead of the upcoming summer months. Even heavier snows dumped in the Northern Sierra, buying homeowners time to make their homes fire safe and firefighters time to burn off dry timber and undergrowth before it becomes the next big blaze.

“We may see a little bit of a delay (in fire season) in Northern California,” said Daniel Swain, a University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist with expertise in wildfires and climate change. “Prescribed fires — this may be another good year to do a lot of that. This is a great example of being able to take advantage of a favorable winter.”

Swain said the scenario is far different in Southern California, still rebuilding from the historically destructive Palisades and Eaton fires that broke out in January. Rainfall is at only half of an average winter, and an April heat wave is expected to bring record-breaking heat to the region.

Climate change is drying fuels on the ground, extending the fire season and the danger not only in the wildlands but in more populated communities across California in the last decade.

“Every town and hamlet in the forest should be hypervigilant about safe fire use and also protecting personal property by home hardening and following state guidance for defensible space,” said Hugh Safford, a fire ecologist at UC Davis and a co-director of the California Fire Science Consortium, which carries out fire science information outreach to agencies and the public.

“But over the last 10 years we have started to burn down whole neighborhoods and now towns in wildfires, and so it’s not just people living right against the wildlands that need to be concerned,” Safford said. “Paradise, Grizzly Flats, Coffey Park, Greenville, Cohasset, Altadena, Pacific Palisades, etc. The list is starting to get long.”

In each place listed named by Safford, a wildfire in the past decade has either killed at least a dozen people or destroyed a large portion of the community — or both.

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