Firewise

Mt Bache Loma Prieta Plus Firewise Community

Welcome to our new Home Page! Everything is still here but reorganized. To view the previous version of this home page, click here

Hello, Neighbors, and thank you for your interest in Firewise! Our goal is to work towards a more sustainable future for our community, protecting lives, homes, and our environment, by hardening our homes and infrastructure to wildfire events and promoting healthy forest and riparian ecosystems. As an NFPA-recognized Firewise community, we are connected to a large knowledgebase and resources to meet our goals. Participation in Firewise within Santa Cruz County is very high and growing every year! To see a map of all Firewise communities recognized by the NFPA, click here. To view Firewise community boundaries within Santa Cruz County specifically, click here.

Learn more about us and how to participate by clicking on the links below.

About Us

We are an NFPA-recognized Firewise Community in Santa Cruz County, running along Mount Bache up to Loma Prieta Way. We include some Highland Way properties and all properties on Haven Hill, Mar Vista, and Rancho Prieta.

Our community boundary includes 78 parcels and 76 dwellings, including vineyard and horse properties as well as forest dwellings. Our water access depends on healthy streams and ground water, and so protecting forest and riparian ecosystems is key to our survival as a community.

Our vision of wildfire resilience includes protecting forest and riparian ecosystems, promoting good fire, and reducing ember ignition risks through home hardening and Zone 0 defense. Understanding our role as environmental stewarts is key to our resilience as a community, whether it be to wildfire, drought, or wet winters. We see our role to be an active one, with the understanding that the Santa Cruz Mountains evolved with humans playing an active role for thousands of years before colonization.

In 2024, we documented $120k in defensible space work, $80k in home hardening, and $1k in education and outreach. We have no doubt these numbers are actually much higher! And we are encouraging our neighbors to track their time and dollars spent towards wildfire resilience in 2025. See more on this topic on the Participant Resources page.

Most updates are shared via an email list, which currently includes 33 households. We also have a WhatsApp group for sharing emergency information. To join these groups, please contact Amy Winkler at winkleramy@gmail.com.

Since not everyone in our community is connected via email and WhatsApp, we also outreach through in-person social events, neighbor-to-neighbor interaction, and postcards. We encourage our online participants to share information about our Upcoming Events with their mountain neighbors and friends!

Insurance Discounts

The California FairPlan offers discounts for Firewise participation, home hardening, and defensible space.

To apply for the Firewise discount, download and share the following documents with your insurance broker:

If you are within our Firewise community boundary, then you automatically qualify for a Firewise participation discount with the California FairPlan in 2025.

To continue to qualify in future years, our Firewise community needs to document and share our wildfire education and risk reduction efforts with Firewise USATM annually, typically around November. We need to show at least one hour of work or $31.80 spent multipled by the number of properties within our boundary. Please help us meet this requirement by documenting your wildfire preparation efforts!

Participants can log wildfire preparation activities here or track privately and share cumulative efforts - time/dollars spent plus estimated amount of brush removed - at the end of the year. Our steering committee will reach out in October to request this information for our annual renewal application.

To see if you might qualify for other discounts, visit the California Department of Insurance website Safer from Wildfires

Contact Us

For any questions or feedback, please reach out to our Firewise leaders: