California embarks on wider push to treat forests, protect communities from wildfire
In the cool, damp days of winter, state and local fire crews are at work making Sonoma County forests more resistant to wildfires and residents a bit safer from the disasters that have tarnished life in the region over the past three years.
Cal Fire, inmate and county crews were at work Friday trimming trees and clearing brush along Mountain Home Ranch Road in the Mayacamas Mountains, a dead-end road that is a high priority for preventive brush management because it is the sole access to rural homes.
Ben Nicholls, a Cal Fire division chief based in Santa Rosa, said the work reducing wildfire hazards will continue this spring and into the future as California pours hundreds of millions of dollars into an effort to protect fire-prone communities from devastating blazes.
It’s a daunting challenge in the face of climate change, with warmer spring and summer weather, reduced snowpack and more intense dry seasons making forests increasingly susceptible to severe conflagrations, a Cal Fire report said last year.
Fire seasons are longer and decades of fire suppression “have disrupted natural fire cycles and added to the problem,” the report said, noting that as many as 15 million acres of California forests need some form of restoration. Brush management, once completed, “must be repeated over the years,” it said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $37 million emergency forest treatment program included projects to reduce the wildfire risks around 200 communities statewide, including Ukiah and Willits in Mendocino County, as the first round in a campaign to address a “massive backlog” of overgrown woodlands in an era of heightened wildfire danger and more people living in harm’s way.
Newsom announced this week the completion of all but one of 35 projects targeting 90,000 acres surrounding the communities deemed by Cal Fire at high risk of wildfires that are growing fiercer and exacting a higher toll on human lives and property.
Two of the projects, the governor said, included removal of wildfire fuels that helped protect Santa Barbara residents during the wind-driven Cave fire in November. His new proposed budget provides $200 million for continued work that includes removal of dead trees, clearing brush, creating firebreaks and protecting evacuation routes.
“California isn’t just waiting around for the next fire season,” Newsom said in statement. “We are acting quickly — with emergency pace — to protect communities most at risk and save lives before the wildfire starts.”
Cal Fire’s report noted that California experienced the “deadliest and most destructive wildfires in its history” in 2017 and 2018, causing the loss of more than 100 lives, destroying nearly 23,000 structures, scorching more than 1.8 million acres and exposing millions of urban and rural residents to unhealthy air.
The 2017 North Bay wildfires alone killed 40 people and leveled more than 6,000 homes.
The 2018 Mendocino Complex fires in Lake and Mendocino counties burned more than 700 square miles, an area so large that if placed on a map of the urban Bay Area it would span from San Francisco to the outskirts of the East Bay and down the peninsula to South Bay.
John Haschak, chairman of the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors, said the Willits project last summer transformed severely overgrown woodlands into a setting “like a city park.”










