The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council played a pivotal role in making sure fuels reduction work finally got done on undeveloped parcels in Brooktrails. Shortly before the holidays, the hills above the fire station echoed with the sound of chainsaws. The California Conservation Corps (CCC) was thinning fuels in an effort to head off another disastrous wildfire season. It was all paid for by grants and accomplished thanks to a multi-agency collaboration.
There are about 4,400 undeveloped parcels in the township. Many of them are privately owned by people who live elsewhere and don’t maintain them. Regardless of who owns them, unmaintained parcels can pose a threat to the entire neighborhood when vegetation gets overgrown, dries out, and turns into kindling for the next wildfire.
Bobbie Delgado, Program Coordinator for the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, reflected on what it took to get the CCC to spend weeks cleaning up the neighborhood.
Originally, she explained, the Coastal Conservancy “provided funding to support us clearing undeveloped land in Brooktrails, specifically that was adjacent to homes. We wanted to address the 100-foot defensible space that landowners weren’t able to get because they were surrounded by undeveloped land.” Initially, the owners of undeveloped parcels got letters seeking permission to work on their property.
It couldn’t have been more simple. But as the years went by, she recalled, “we noticed that we weren’t able to get letters from the landowners,” giving permission to do the work on their property. This is due to a number of reasons, from owners’ residential addresses not being up to date to owners not even knowing they’ve inherited a piece of property they may not have ever seen. Delgado noted that “this has been going on for about 30-40 years. Brooktrails has a nuisance vegetation ordinance that allows it to abate nuisance vegetation on private property and eventually recoup the costs from the owners by placing a lien on the land. But the likelihood of ever getting reimbursed by people who have no interest in their assets and don’t answer their mail is not worth the labor costs.
To carry out the Coastal Conservancy grant-funded work the Brooktrails Township Community Services District cooperated with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council to develop a new process whereby the District sent abatement notices to property owners stating that, if they did not get the work done themselves within 30 days, the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council would be authorized to access their property to abate fuel load hazards. The letter inspired a number of absentee owners to step up and manage their own property by hiring crews to clean up their parcels. And, “if they don’t take any action and they don’t respond, then we have the right to work on their property,” Delgado summarized. So, as grant funds or other resources become available, this process can enable significant progress in abating nuisance vegetation.
To maximize the potential benefit of the process, a pivotal meeting took place in August of last year between the Brooktrails Township Community Services District, the County of Mendocino, CAL FIRE, local firefighting agencies including the Ukiah Valley Fire District Fuels Reduction Crew, and the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council. At that meeting, the entities hammered out a plan. First, the fire chief would designate the most high-priority areas needing abatement work. Then, as grant-funded resources become available, property owners in those areas would receive letters seeking permission to do the work. If they didn’t respond within 30 days, crews could access their properties and do it for them.
Another opportunity soon arose out of a partnership between the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council and the CCC. This allowed the Fire Safe Council to design a project using a combination of State-funded CCC crews and Fire Safe Council resources, like its chipper. That collaboration has expanded to include the CCC work currently underway in Brooktrails. There is still a lot of work to do, as long as the resources are available to fund it. “We have nearly touched the amount of letters to go out to every undeveloped landowner,” Delgado clarified. The fire chief has prioritized five locations, which will result in about 20 acres being treated for both roadside clearance and defensible space around homes.
Delgado is optimistic about further collaborations with the CCC, the Ukiah Valley Fire District Fuels Crew, CAL FIRE and others. She stopped by the worksite to visit crew supervisor Cedar Long, who was guiding a group of young adults through the process of cutting down small trees safely and thoughtfully. Long has collaborated with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council before, offering a popular women’s chainsaw workshop in Laytonville. As a former firefighter in Mendocino and Humboldt counties, Long is fully committed to forest health and fire safety.
In addition to providing a huge labor force to communities like Brooktrails, the CCC is also a youth development program. “We do a lot of skills instructions, trainings, certifications, things like that, that help our corps membership post-CCC,” Long said. The 14-person crew was working on getting certified to fell trees using chainsaws, after which they would be trained on using a chipper. “They’re working their tails off to get all the woody debris up to the chipper, and then it’ll get run through, and the chips will be distributed back into the forest floor to biodegrade” nourishing the floor and discouraging resprouts from popping up again. “So there’s a whole lot going on,” Long concluded. “Many of our corps members are interested in careers in firefighting, so learning about fuel diameters and fuel loading in the forests and how to improve safe ingress and egress for both residents and firefighters is a huge part of their learning process here as well. It just makes them more knowledgeable and safe for firefighters when they’re out on the line.”
To learn more about improving fire safety and fire resiliency in your neighborhood, visit the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council website at firesafemendocino.org.
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