💗 Thank you for participating in Firewise 💗
As a Firewise community, we aim to support each other's wildfire resiliency efforts. All requests and recommendations on this page are completely voluntary. We welcome your participation, whether it be to share information with us or tackle a big defensible space project. Firewise is here as a support.
We put together the information on this page to share what wildfire experts in our community recommend, starting with addressing our highest risk items. Feel free to reach out to us on the steering committee with any comments, questions, or suggestions. Our contact details are available on the Home Page
To remain a Firewise community in good standing, we need to report our cumulative time and dollars spent on wildfire resiliency efforts to the National Fire Protection Agency. We ask our participants to please log your time and dollars spent on any efforts toward home hardening, defensible space, wildfire education, and evacuation planning.
Residents can use our shared spreadsheet or can track privately and share with our steering committee in October for inclusion in our annual Firewise renewal application.
To leave this page and log your Firewise activities on our shared spreadsheet, click here
We are starting to track contractor recommendations among our residents and make these available to our community participants. We welcome your input! To share a recommendation, you can email winkleramy@gmail.com or enter directly in our shared spreadsheet above (see the Contractor Experiences Tab). Once added, these entries will appear in the read-only spreadsheet below.
Our recommended actions this year are based on our community risk assessment and survey. The focus is on individual home hardening, emergency services access, evacuation planning, wildfire education, and outreach.
When assessing your home's wildfire risk, consider these three categories of home ignition. Of these, 90% of homes are destroyed during a wildfire event due to ember ignition in Zone 0.
For those new to Zone 0 home hardening practices or even for those veteran mountain residents who want to check-in on their progress, we recommend these free assessments:
The state of California is planning to require some Zone 0 practices to be followed by law, with enforcement beginning around 2028. A public workshop was held in March 4, 2025 for feedback.
For our community to thrive, we need to promote healthy forest and riparian ecosystems around us. We often repeat the phrase, "trees are not the problem, we are," as a way of reminding ourselves that our best path forward is to first focus on our home structure and Zone 0 and then work outwards, with the goal of supporting the natural environment. Indigenous people used fire to remove low-lying shrubs and non-fire resistant plants, creating magestic redwood forests over thousands of years. These forests were ideal for sheltering people walking under the canopy and for providing visibility for hunting.
The recommendations from CAL FIRE in Zone 2, 30-100' from the home, follow a similar model. We aim to reduce ladder fuels, which can carry fire from the ground into the canopy. This creates a sense of spaciousness under the tree canopy and greater visibility. We also aim to create shaded fuel breaks to slow the spread of invasive vegetation and reducing the heat produced during a wildfire event.
Forest management is its own specialty! We recommend the following resources to learn more:
During a wildfire event, we recommend evacuating when ordered to make room for firefighters to contain it. Many homeowneres stay behind to fight ember ignitions around their home rather than evacuate, putting themselves in life-threatening situations and possibly diverting resources for rescue operations.
Firefighters are often deployed to the front line of an approaching fire, which can be miles from ember ignition events, so staying behind can feel like the only way to save your home. This is why focusing on home hardening and Zone 0 recommendations is so critical! These actions are designed to prevent ember ignition events near your home and buy time for firefighters to identify and respond to any new fires ignitied by embers in your neighborhood.
We want our firefighters to be as prepared as possible to save our communities. Please consider participating in our Community Map Project! We need your help to identify water sources, emergency vehicle turnarounds, and staging areas in our community. We update this information with CALFIRE as we receive it.
Please be familiar with the evacuation information resources below: