fire resilience – Enviro Updates

California again delays ‘zone zero’ wildfire protection rules for homes

December 10, 2025

Todd Woody, BLOOMBERG

A California state agency won’t meet Governor Gavin Newsom’s year-end deadline to finish long-delayed regulations to protect homes from wildfires, rules that experts say could have limited the destruction of the January Los Angeles firestorms.

At a meeting of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection on Monday, chair Terrence O’Brien said officials would wait until March 2026 to continue work on regulations to require ember-resistant zones, called Zone Zero, around some 2 million houses in high-risk wildfire areas. That means it could be mid-2029 or later before any mandate takes effect for existing homes.

O’Brien cited continued disagreement on how strictly to enforce the Zone Zero requirement to remove plants, wood fences and other combustible material within five feet of a home for the ongoing delays. A 2020 law enacted after a series of devastating wildfires originally mandated a January 2023 deadline to complete the regulations. “That continues to be the challenge we face,” he said at the meeting.

Land Usebuilding regulations, Calfire, California Board of Forestry, fire resilience, wildfire hazard, zone zero

Why more than 1,000 goats are working for Santa Rosa this fire season

June 17, 2025

Madison Smalstig, PRESS DEMOCRAT

The Santa Rosa Fire Department has brought in some unusual help this summer: more than 1,000 goats — and possibly some sheep.

The animals, hired through two contractors, began work June 8 and are expected to munch through about 130 acres of dry grass and weeds across eight city sites. The contractors — Goats R Us of Orinda and CAPRA Environmental Services of Roseville — will manage the herds as they move through the properties.

The “grazing team” will target areas that typically meet city fire maintenance standards but are difficult to clear using equipment because of rocky terrain or steep slopes.

In Upper Brush Creek Park, for example, city crews would normally cut a 30-foot fuel break around the perimeter but leave the hilly interior untouched, Santa Rosa Division Chief Fire Marshal Paul Lowenthal said.

Sustainable Livingfire resilience, goats

North Bay communities lose tens of millions in federal funding for wildfire preparation work

May 21, 2025

Marisa Endicott, PRESS DEMOCRAT

As peak wildfire season arrives, Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties are scrambling to address the loss of key FEMA grants for fire prevention work already underway.

The Brooktrails community sits in a rugged area of unincorporated Mendocino County a few miles west of Willits. Home to over 3,000 people, the neighborhood is packed in amid thick brush, forest and windy roads. Many of the homes are surrounded by abandoned overgrown lots, there’s one main route in and out and water is limited.

“It has been labeled one of the most fire dangerous communities in the state for a really good reason,” said Scott Cratty, executive director of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council. “It’s got all the elements if fire gets in there to be very bad.”

In August, Mendocino County was awarded a $3.6 million grant through the federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program, the first phase of a $50-million project which would have gone to reducing fuels across roughly 1,500 acres of land and creating defensible space and retrofits for hundreds of homes in and around the Brooktrails area.

Sonoma and Napa counties also received multi-million-dollar BRIC grants for similar work to make homes less likely to catch and spread fire in a region increasingly prone to devastating blazes.

ForestsBRIC grants, defensible space, fire resilience, wildfires, wildland urban interface

Why are lone homes left standing after the Los Angeles fires? It’s not entirely luck

January 19, 2025

Ed Davey & Ingrid Lobet, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Emails and videos of burned buildings in Los Angeles next to those left standing have been flying back and forth among architects, builders and fire safety specialists around the world.

For many homeowners, like Enrique Balcazar, the sometimes scattershot nature of the carnage can seem like random chance. Balcazar, a real estate agent, posted video that showed little more than chimneys remaining of most homes on his block after fire leapt through his Altadena neighborhood. Balcazar stood on his neighbor’s destroyed classic Mustang to douse his smoldering roof, but his home was otherwise fine.

“It’s an older house and it still has the old wood sidings,” Balcazar said. “To me there’s nothing explainable in logical or scientific reason of why my house would not have burned.”

Many experts say luck does play a part. After all, wind can shift 180 degrees in a split second, pushing fire away from your house and towards a neighbor’s. But they also say there are many ways that homes can be made less vulnerable to fire.

Climate Change & Energy, Forests, Land Usefire resilience, house hardening, rebuilding after fire, wildfire, wildfire hazard

California is years behind in implementing a law to make homes more fire resistant

January 17, 2025

Tran Nguyen, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Reeling from destructive wildfires, including the deadliest in California history, state lawmakers in 2020 passed new requirements for clearing combustible materials like dead plants and wooden furniture within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of homes in risky areas.

The rules were set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. But as Los Angeles grapples with blazes that have destroyed thousands of homes in what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, the regulations still haven’t been written. The state Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has no firm timeline for completing them.

“It’s frustrating at every level of government,” said Democratic state Sen. Henry Stern, who was part of a group of lawmakers who authored the legislation. “I feel like a failure on it, being quite frank.”

Most of the neighborhoods ravaged by the Palisades Fire are in areas that must follow state requirements to keep the immediate surroundings of their homes free of combustible materials and would be subject to the new rules because they are deemed at highest fire risk by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The fire, driven by hurricane-force winds that spread embers by air, destroyed at least 5,000 structures across areas including Pacific Palisades, Malibu and Topanga Canyon.

Climate Change & Energy, Forests, Land UseBoard of Forestry, defensible space, fire resilience, house hardening, rebuilding after fire

Fulton nursery a go-to spot for native plants

May 3, 2024

Jeff Cox, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Cal-Flora Nursery in Fulton
California Native Plant Society – Milo Baker Chapter

The showy lady’s slipper (Cypripedium reginae) that grows east of the Rockies is a large wild orchid that reaches up to 30 inches tall, with 3- to 4-inch-long, slipperlike flowers of rose pink. They don’t grow around here. But their distant cousins do, and they look very different.

Our Sonoma County summer fog calls forth these plants where the redwoods grow tall and human activity is at a minimum. In these conditions, the forest floor may be sprinkled with them. The jewel-like pink fairy slippers (Calypso bulbosa) grow only 2 to 4 inches tall and produce 1- to 2-inch “slippers” that only fairy feet could fit.

Why such a difference among woodland orchids? You might think that our mild climate and rich woodland soils would yield orchids even larger than those back east where winter locks up the soil in ice for nearly half the year.

The answer is our summer drought, where it rarely rains from June to October. Plants native to our Mediterranean climate, as it’s called, have evolved to deal with the dry season. Some, like the California fuchsia (Zauschneria californica) have amped up drought tolerance to astonishing levels, blooming furiously in late summer despite not having a drink for months. Some simply shut down their green, vegetative parts and turn dry and brown, sending their roots to sleep until rain returns, or overwinter as seeds fallen to the ground.

Habitats, Sustainable Livingecosystems, fire resilience, native plant gardening, native plants, pollinators

Two California fires in the Sierra Nevada have very different outcomes. Why?

July 30, 2022

Alex Wigglesworth, LOS ANGELES TIMES

The two fires started just 17 miles apart in the rugged terrain of California’s western Sierra Nevada — but their outcomes couldn’t have been more different.

The Washburn fire, which ignited July 7 along a forested trail in Yosemite National Park, was nearly contained, with no damage to structures or to the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

But the Oak fire, which sparked almost two weeks later in the foothills near Midpines, confounded firefighters as it exploded to four times the size of Washburn and forced thousands to flee as it destroyed at least 106 homes. At times, the wildfire’s smoke plume could be seen from space.

Why was one fire so much more destructive?

Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.

The Washburn fire started along a trail on the edge of the Mariposa Grove, just downhill from the road used by shuttle buses to ferry tourists from a parking lot.

Forestsfire ecology, fire resilience, prescribed burns