Cal Fire to set up new fire camp in eastern Sonoma County

Decades after Cal Fire closed its last fire camp in Sonoma County, ending an era of locally based, live-in locations for hand crews, the state and county have agreed to a deal for a new, year-round location east of Santa Rosa.

The move is aimed to improve response times in an especially fire-prone area of the county and enable more of the year-round brush management work seen as critical to stemming the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

“By us getting a crew back here to the county it allows us to not only have a resource when we have wildfire events, but it also gives us that critical capacity to do that proactive fuels work outside of those wildfire events,” said Cal Fire Division Chief Ben Nichols.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved an agreement granting Cal Fire a three-year lease of space at the county’s Los Guilicos campus off Highway 12 east of Oakmont.

The campus sits in the western shadow of Hood Mountain and suffered significant damage in the 2020 Glass fire.

Cal Fire’s Black Mountain Conservation Camp, in far western Sonoma County north of Jenner, closed in the 1990s.

That left local hand crew work to teams based at Delta Conservation Camp in Solano County, Konocti Conservation Camp in Lake County and Chamberlain Creek Camp in Mendocino County.

“To get any conservation camp, any hand crew work done west of Highway 101 was really difficult from our travel times,” said Chief Tom Knecht of Cal Fire’s Lake-Sonoma-Napa unit.

Hand crews are typically responsible for working with chain saws and axes to reduce fuels, thin trees and place control lines during a fire.

Knecht called them an “invaluable resource.”

Expected to open at the end of spring just before peak fire season, the new camp will house 14-member crews at a time, made up of 12 firefighters and two captains. About 40 people will be assigned to the camp in total.

The camp will total one acre of outdoor space and over 10,000 square feet of indoor multiuse space, according to the county. The lease includes the building used by the former Sierra Youth Center, a juvenile probation facility, as well as the adjacent parking area and yard.

Cal Fire is leasing the property for $0 but will pay utilities and cover the cost of retrofitting the buildings to meet current standards, Nichols said.

That retrofitting work is expected to cost $47,000, Nichols said.

“It is exciting to see the unused facilities at the Los Guilicos campus put to such good use for the community,” Supervisor Susan Gorin, who represents the Sonoma Valley, said in a county news release. “The Cal Fire camp will provide the valley and county as a whole an additional critical resource in building fire protection.”

Cal Fire’s aim is to have the camp ready for crews by the peak of fire season this year, Nichols said.

The stationed crew will be seasonal, meaning firefighters will be staffed at the camp nine months out of the year, while a fuel abatement team is expected to be at the camp for about three months a year during the wet season, according to the release.

Cal Fire has been searching for a facility in Sonoma County since the 2019 Kincade fire, Nichols said.

The 77,758-acre blaze, the largest on record in the county, burned for two weeks through northern Sonoma County, threatening Geyserville, Healdsburg, Windsor and northeast Santa Rosa, and forcing the evacuation of more than 190,000 residents countywide. It destroyed 174 homes and a total of 370 structures, including winery and farm buildings.

In 2020, the Glass fire that burned from Napa County into eastern Santa Rosa did extensive damage to the Los Guilicos complex.

But Knecht, who fought in the most destructive of the county’s recent fires — the Glass, and the Nuns and Tubbs fires in 2017 — said he is not worried about the camp’s location. He said the buildings are safe and the camp has “excellent defensible space.”

“Los Guilicos is going to be a win-win for Cal Fire and Sonoma County,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Murphy at 707-521-5228 or emma.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MurphReports.