Mount Shasta Area Community Wildfire Protection Plan
926-2089
Meetings: Mt. Shasta City Park on the 1st Thursday at 7:00pm
FREE GREENWASTE TO ENERGY SITE TO RE-OPEN
To help alleviate the costly burden of biomass disposal, for the second year in a row there will be a free greenwaste collection site, thanks to a partnership of the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council, the City of Mt. Shasta, the Mt. Shasta High School football team, Siskiyou County, Cal Works, CALFIRE, and the Fire Safe Council of Siskiyou County. Due to open Monday, May 2nd, 2011 this biomass collection site will be open from 9 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Monday through Friday and on Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 3:30 P.M., being closed on Sunday. The site may be open for only about a 45-day period, depending on fire weather. Greenwaste only can be received at the site. No leaves, dirt, stumps, rocks, metal, plastic, construction waste, painted/ treated lumber, nor other contaminants will be allowed. This is an excellent opportunity to perform spring clean-up of storm damage from past winter and also get property fire-safe compliant to the law, Public Resource Code 4291. Recently it has also been reported to local Fire Safe Councils that a number of insurance companies are issuing “comply or get cancelled” letters to many insured property owners who are not meeting fire-safe requirements.
The biomass collected will be processed as a free public service by owner Tristan Allen of the Siskiyou County-based CLT Logging Company and hauled to Roseburg Forest Products’ newly expanded biomass plan for efficient conversion to electric energy, lessening the region’s dependence on coal-fired electric production purchases from outside the region.
Location of the free “greenwaste to energy” collection yard is in south Mt. Shasta City, at the old Roseburg Mill site across South Mt. Shasta Boulevard from Finlandia Motel.
ANOTHER CHANCE, Part I by Dale Nova
A snow-surrounded Deadwood inmate handcrew, led by their CALFIRE captain, cuts a fuelbreak on a Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council project.
The heavy brush and trees on the hillside wore white coats as the orange-clad figures slogged through the snow, their cheap rubber boots made crunching sounds on the trail as the slippery soles attempted to purchase the packed, icy white stuff. These were inmates, an all-male work crew from the Deadwood Conservation Camp, whose souls have been purchased for untold years by the State of California. If their past lives were slippery and criminally-intented, now they are getting another chance to get positive traction in a lifestyle that demands discipline, focus, courage, teamwork, tenacity, and a kind of character many inmates may have never had nurtured before. The deliverable goods offered now from places like Deadwood Camp are hope, self-worth from a sense of accomplishment, future marketable job skills, and a lot more.
Created in California at the end of World War II, the California Conservation Camp Program was and still is a joint venture of the California Division (now Department) of Forestry, CALFIRE for short and the California Department of Corrections (now known most hopefully as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation – even on Death Row it’s CDCR). The “Camp” program’s primary mission is to provide trained firefighter handcrews for the high demands that California’s burgeoning population poignantly place on fire services every fire season, and in Southern California, that fire season may be all 12 months of the year. There are nearly 50 CDCR conservation camps throughout the state; 3 of them are all female camps. Prison inmate candidates for CDCR camps are minimum custody felons who cannot have ever had any convictions for a sex-related offense, arson or escape. Many have been convicted for drug or alcohol violations.
The California Conservation Camp Program has been lauded as the most successful inmate firefighting camp program in the nation and has been a model for many other states. Conservatively, the program saves California taxpayers well over a hundred million dollars a year thanks to the often thankless work these incarcerated men, women, and their leaders do. Fighting fires, they often work some of the worse sectors of fireline, some exceptions being those often jumped by elite federal smokejumpers, attacked by highly cross-trained CALFIRE or federal helitack teams, or swarmed by high-balling “Hot Shot” teams. It’s not surprising that CALFIRE has purposed to proselytize smokejumper, helitack, and Hot Shot fire team leaders, inculcating many into the ranks of CALFIRE captains who lead California handcrews from CALFIRE/CDCR conservation camps.
The Conservation Camp Program has several other roles when fighting fire is not presently their primary objective. They can shift easily to many other conservation-minded endeavors. One huge measure of assistance extended by CALFIRE-led CDCR handcrews, to the great appreciation by citizens and Fire Safe Councils, is providing trained, tooled-up, and fire-savvy sources of labor for fire-safe projects in the wildland (sometimes urban) interfaces around communities - cutting fuelbreaks, shaded fuelbreaks, developing defensible space near structures, and chipping brush. Loading brush to be hauled to biomass recycling yards for biofuel is not uncommon, and California handcrews perform a lot of judicious burning as conditions permit. This tremendous safety service has become a great partnership with community leaders, particularly in our current economic times as cities, towns, and neighborhoods struggle to become more fire safe.
Now, the burning question today, before thousands of acres burn and hopefully NOT homes in the next fire season is: how can we get more of these inmate conservation camps working in Siskiyou County and the North State? With the cost of keeping an inmate housed at a camp estimated to be one-third the cost of housing an inmate in a state prison, the savings shouts loud and clear, especially with the production of so much great public service work. Also laudable, the rate of recidivism for a camp inmate is very low, a small fraction compared to that of a former prison-housed inmate re-incarcerated.
Using just basic math and common sense, it makes obviously good sense to create more inmate conservation camps. Let’s hope our elected representatives in government can be persuaded to put some timely, lucid legislation together and help make it happen! Yet we citizens need to take positive action to encourage fiscal responsibility and write away! Questions on how you can help? Contact Dale Nova at (530)926-2089.
Senior Citizen Project, November 2010
The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council recently performed its eighth and final free fuel reduction project for the year. The Saturday volunteer work day involved six good men who assisted a needy widowed senior citizen woman with a significant amount of brush and tree work necessary to make her residence more fire-safe.
Throughout the year, the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council has assisted several needy local senior citizens who not only had fuel reduction challenges to become more fire-safe but also, following January’s “storm of the century” had desperate situations such as trees on their homes, across driveways, or strewn across their properties, necessitating not only clean up but also burn pile assistance. Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council volunteers also cut trees to help clear many fire hydrants throughout the city, for no pay, NO FEMA reimbursement, and no free lunches, but they were still smiling when the tasks were completed.
Success Story; Taming the Fire Beast
High up on Old McCloud Avenue above the town of Mount Shasta lives one of the grittiest guys I know. His name is Peter Chesko and he lives in an area that is long overdue for a major wildfire event. Choked with manzanita, bitter cherry, pine thickets and oak loaded with dead-down-to-the-ground ladder fuels, this area is spotted sporadically with homes and structures in circumstances perfect for the fire beast to gobble it all up. Few homes in this 40-year-old subdivision would survive a wind-driven wildfire. Most of them are accessed only by single way in and out narrow driveways. Not having a second egress route could be a suicidal escape effort for homeowners in the event of a fire. It would be a major risk for a fire engine crew to take a stand at protecting many of these homes in a fast-moving wildfire.
Peter Chesko’s home is different. Over a period of fifteen years, he has quietly, conscientiously and persistently been reducing fuels on his two and a half acre parcel. He’s thinned out the feedstock of the fire beast, the copious bush, thick groups of tree saplings (known to firefighters as “dog hair”), along with dead and downed vegetation on the forest floor. These are items the fire beast would bolt down, and then run hell-roaring, hurling out a flame-front that firefighters fear and may directly attack with temerity. Their safest tactics would be to cautiously flank the fire at the expense of seeing homes burn, but providing for firefighter safety first.
Peter Chesko in front of his fuel reduced property.
Starting small, Peter first cut a path through the thick, heavy ten-foot tall manzanita a short distance from his homesite. Using this as his first avenue of defense, he anchored his work from this path, widening it, thinning his brush, oak, and pines plus raising the canopy skirts a safe height from the ground on his leave trees to lessen opportunities for ground fire to climb up into his tree tops and race away.
Now, Peter Chesko’s parcel is refreshingly and naturally park-like! The skinny pines and other species selected to remain due to their spacing, strong form, and good health are maturing, growing vigorous and stout. Oaks now offer a pleasant ambiance, wildlife forage, and safety. Among his trees and indigenous plants now grow a diversity of native wildflowers, herbs, and other plants that Peter meticulously thins and tends like a garden.
The most refreshing element of this narrative is Peter’s very positive demeanor, tenacity, and attitude. Even though in the last few years he’s had to hire help to climb his bigger trees and for doing some of the heavy work, Peter is the vigilant, diligent steward of his part of the world. He is a particularly outstanding inspiration to me, also considering the fact that he has courageously struggled with an adversary that has badgered him since the day he was born, cerebral palsy.
Guest Editorial: December 2010 by Dale Nova, Co-Facilitator of the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council
BEFORE photo prior to fuel reduction treatment depicts a home off Cantara Road drowning in a sea of potentially highly explosive fire fuel, given an ignition source and bad fire weather.
AFTER photo profoundly profiles a presently much more fire-safe homestead that is now much more defensible from wildfire consuming it while affording firefighters a safer opportunity suppress it.
Thanks to a substantial grant from the U.S. Forest Service, the South Mt. Shasta city area is now more fire-safe. The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council recently completed Phase I of an impressive fuel reduction project in the area, helping establish a shaded fuelbreak in the lower Little Big Canyon drainage near the intersection of South Old Stage Road and Cantara Loop Road. Additionally, several homes and structures along Snowblower Lane received defensible space fuel reduction treatment. Also both sides of the adjacent Union Pacific railroad tracks, from past railroad-owners a very significant source of many wildfire ignitions, received fuel reduction within the 300 feet wide shaded fuelbreak. Nearly a half-mile of fuel reduction was accomplished along Union Pacific Railroad’s paralleling service road to not only create better access for fire-safe work crews, but also enhance quicker, safer response time for fire suppression forces into the populated area during a wildfire event.
Phase II of this project has already been instigated, although work has been hampered recently by recent snowfall. The fuelbreak construction is to continue all the way to Interstate 5, to the backyards of homeowners in the Sun Mt. Subdivision, combined with a shaded fuelbreak presently being constructed in Big Canyon from the Union Pacific railroad tracks north to I-5, then downhill paralleling I-5 (another very high frequency wildfire source from motor vehicles) and also progressing south, paralleling Union Pacific railroad tracks.
Ultimately, this fuel reduction project will effectively help keep wildfire from the doors of hundreds of homes in the South Mt. Shasta area, and in a catastrophic wind-driven wildfire event, hopefully keep one from racing into the greater Mt. Shasta City area.
The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe council has some strong partners in this worthy endeavor. Besides the U.S. Forest Service and their generous financial support, Cal Fire? has provided California handcrews, technical, and professional expertise. The Fire Safe Council of Siskiyou County is a key partner along with Union Pacific Railroad, with both organizations providing expertise. Siskiyou County Public Works Department has also partnered with provisions of landline survey and road traffic control assistance.
Also this project has created dozens of jobs. Summitt Forests, Inc., with the majority of its employees from Siskiyou County, provided all the handcrew work in Phase I. Phase II fuelbreak mastication is being performed by Singleton (Clint) Construction of Montague, with majority all Siskiyou County employees.
Additionally, vendors are grateful to benefit from the many dollars of fuel, supplies, tools, and other goods purchased to help complete the project, which will also help the sustainability of Siskiyou County’s fragile economy, while helping to keep those vendors’ employees more gainfully employed.
HOMEOWNERS CAN BE MORE FIRE SAFE BEFORE WILDFIRES ARRIVE
A Guest Editorial by Dale Nova and Richelle Hubble, August 2010
A swift, wind-driven fire hit consumed 11 houses and damaged 4 others recently in Ashland. Oregon Department of Forestry’s Brian Ballou was quoted in the Mail Tribune regarding the intensity and rapid spread of the wildfire, “The bottom line is that there was a continuous string of fuel from the north to south end.” The wildfire was allegedly caused by an inebriated transient, who was later apprehended. Unfortunately, an event such as this could happen anywhere in Siskiyou County, particularly in Mount Shasta where high-density housing is the norm and the area is vulnerable to human-caused wildfire causes due to proximities to the I-5 corridor, railroad lines, logging practices, high recreation use, and brush-surrounded Mott Airport.
Half the battle is educating homeowners to be fire-safe; the other half is putting that knowledge into action. The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council (MSAFSC) has assertively embraced these tasks for 8 years now. In 2003, funded by a $48,000 U.S. Forest Service grant, MSAFSC collaborated to produce a Mt. Shasta Community Wildfire Protection Plan, lauded by fire agencies as a highly valuable tool. The MSAFSC has joined forces with numerous homeowners on fire-safe projects. Recently, another U.S. Forest Service-funded grant for the MSAFSC will begin this autumn on fuelbreak construction and residential defensible space in the South Mt. Shasta area. Our bottom line—homeowners need to step up to the plate and now do their part by taking care of making their properties more fire-safe for their safety, their neighbors, and their community.
There are many ways to be fire-safe that would help prevent wildfires but also decrease the amount of damage should one occur. Simple actions such as clearing pine-needle filled rain gutters, storing firewood safely—not against the side of one’s home, using fire-resistant building materials and landscape plants are big helps. A 100-foot minimum fuel-reduced defensible space around homes and other permitted structures is state law. Dale Nova, joint facilitator to the Mt. Shasta Are Fire Safe Council, estimates that a very large percentage of Mt. Shasta area residents are NOT in compliance. Not only will this action help protect your home and the lives of firefighters, but can also prevent the domino effect that occurred in Ashland, where fire jumped from tree to tree then house to house to house. Clearing dry fire fuels from around your home and removing the lower branches of trees to help prevent a fire from climbing into the tree’s canopy, and then jumping from these burning adjacent trees to roofs is all too common and deeply tragic scenario.
For better fire-safe education and on-the-ground counseling, there are multiple fire agencies at your disposal. The best way to start is to contact your local Fire Safe Council today! Monthly meeting dates and times are available at <firesafesiskiyou.org> or call Giselle or Dale Nova at (530)926-2089.
Second Anniversary of Mt. Shasta Are Fire Safe Council Potluck
Images from September 2, 2004 Mountain Thin Project Field Trip.
Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council
Dale Nova926-2089
Meetings: Mt. Shasta City Park on the 1st Thursday at 7:00pm
FREE GREENWASTE TO ENERGY SITE TO RE-OPEN
To help alleviate the costly burden of biomass disposal, for the second year in a row there will be a free greenwaste collection site, thanks to a partnership of the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council, the City of Mt. Shasta, the Mt. Shasta High School football team, Siskiyou County, Cal Works, CALFIRE, and the Fire Safe Council of Siskiyou County. Due to open Monday, May 2nd, 2011 this biomass collection site will be open from 9 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. Monday through Friday and on Saturdays from 10 A.M. to 3:30 P.M., being closed on Sunday. The site may be open for only about a 45-day period, depending on fire weather. Greenwaste only can be received at the site. No leaves, dirt, stumps, rocks, metal, plastic, construction waste, painted/ treated lumber, nor other contaminants will be allowed. This is an excellent opportunity to perform spring clean-up of storm damage from past winter and also get property fire-safe compliant to the law, Public Resource Code 4291. Recently it has also been reported to local Fire Safe Councils that a number of insurance companies are issuing “comply or get cancelled” letters to many insured property owners who are not meeting fire-safe requirements.
The biomass collected will be processed as a free public service by owner Tristan Allen of the Siskiyou County-based CLT Logging Company and hauled to Roseburg Forest Products’ newly expanded biomass plan for efficient conversion to electric energy, lessening the region’s dependence on coal-fired electric production purchases from outside the region.
Location of the free “greenwaste to energy” collection yard is in south Mt. Shasta City, at the old Roseburg Mill site across South Mt. Shasta Boulevard from Finlandia Motel.
ANOTHER CHANCE, Part I by Dale Nova
A snow-surrounded Deadwood inmate handcrew, led by their CALFIRE captain, cuts a fuelbreak on a Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council project.
The heavy brush and trees on the hillside wore white coats as the orange-clad figures slogged through the snow, their cheap rubber boots made crunching sounds on the trail as the slippery soles attempted to purchase the packed, icy white stuff. These were inmates, an all-male work crew from the Deadwood Conservation Camp, whose souls have been purchased for untold years by the State of California. If their past lives were slippery and criminally-intented, now they are getting another chance to get positive traction in a lifestyle that demands discipline, focus, courage, teamwork, tenacity, and a kind of character many inmates may have never had nurtured before. The deliverable goods offered now from places like Deadwood Camp are hope, self-worth from a sense of accomplishment, future marketable job skills, and a lot more.
Created in California at the end of World War II, the California Conservation Camp Program was and still is a joint venture of the California Division (now Department) of Forestry, CALFIRE for short and the California Department of Corrections (now known most hopefully as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation – even on Death Row it’s CDCR). The “Camp” program’s primary mission is to provide trained firefighter handcrews for the high demands that California’s burgeoning population poignantly place on fire services every fire season, and in Southern California, that fire season may be all 12 months of the year. There are nearly 50 CDCR conservation camps throughout the state; 3 of them are all female camps. Prison inmate candidates for CDCR camps are minimum custody felons who cannot have ever had any convictions for a sex-related offense, arson or escape. Many have been convicted for drug or alcohol violations.
The California Conservation Camp Program has been lauded as the most successful inmate firefighting camp program in the nation and has been a model for many other states. Conservatively, the program saves California taxpayers well over a hundred million dollars a year thanks to the often thankless work these incarcerated men, women, and their leaders do. Fighting fires, they often work some of the worse sectors of fireline, some exceptions being those often jumped by elite federal smokejumpers, attacked by highly cross-trained CALFIRE or federal helitack teams, or swarmed by high-balling “Hot Shot” teams. It’s not surprising that CALFIRE has purposed to proselytize smokejumper, helitack, and Hot Shot fire team leaders, inculcating many into the ranks of CALFIRE captains who lead California handcrews from CALFIRE/CDCR conservation camps.
The Conservation Camp Program has several other roles when fighting fire is not presently their primary objective. They can shift easily to many other conservation-minded endeavors. One huge measure of assistance extended by CALFIRE-led CDCR handcrews, to the great appreciation by citizens and Fire Safe Councils, is providing trained, tooled-up, and fire-savvy sources of labor for fire-safe projects in the wildland (sometimes urban) interfaces around communities - cutting fuelbreaks, shaded fuelbreaks, developing defensible space near structures, and chipping brush. Loading brush to be hauled to biomass recycling yards for biofuel is not uncommon, and California handcrews perform a lot of judicious burning as conditions permit. This tremendous safety service has become a great partnership with community leaders, particularly in our current economic times as cities, towns, and neighborhoods struggle to become more fire safe.
Now, the burning question today, before thousands of acres burn and hopefully NOT homes in the next fire season is: how can we get more of these inmate conservation camps working in Siskiyou County and the North State? With the cost of keeping an inmate housed at a camp estimated to be one-third the cost of housing an inmate in a state prison, the savings shouts loud and clear, especially with the production of so much great public service work. Also laudable, the rate of recidivism for a camp inmate is very low, a small fraction compared to that of a former prison-housed inmate re-incarcerated.
Using just basic math and common sense, it makes obviously good sense to create more inmate conservation camps. Let’s hope our elected representatives in government can be persuaded to put some timely, lucid legislation together and help make it happen! Yet we citizens need to take positive action to encourage fiscal responsibility and write away! Questions on how you can help? Contact Dale Nova at (530)926-2089.
Senior Citizen Project, November 2010
The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council recently performed its eighth and final free fuel reduction project for the year. The Saturday volunteer work day involved six good men who assisted a needy widowed senior citizen woman with a significant amount of brush and tree work necessary to make her residence more fire-safe.
Throughout the year, the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council has assisted several needy local senior citizens who not only had fuel reduction challenges to become more fire-safe but also, following January’s “storm of the century” had desperate situations such as trees on their homes, across driveways, or strewn across their properties, necessitating not only clean up but also burn pile assistance. Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council volunteers also cut trees to help clear many fire hydrants throughout the city, for no pay, NO FEMA reimbursement, and no free lunches, but they were still smiling when the tasks were completed.
Success Story; Taming the Fire Beast
High up on Old McCloud Avenue above the town of Mount Shasta lives one of the grittiest guys I know. His name is Peter Chesko and he lives in an area that is long overdue for a major wildfire event. Choked with manzanita, bitter cherry, pine thickets and oak loaded with dead-down-to-the-ground ladder fuels, this area is spotted sporadically with homes and structures in circumstances perfect for the fire beast to gobble it all up. Few homes in this 40-year-old subdivision would survive a wind-driven wildfire. Most of them are accessed only by single way in and out narrow driveways. Not having a second egress route could be a suicidal escape effort for homeowners in the event of a fire. It would be a major risk for a fire engine crew to take a stand at protecting many of these homes in a fast-moving wildfire.
Peter Chesko’s home is different. Over a period of fifteen years, he has quietly, conscientiously and persistently been reducing fuels on his two and a half acre parcel. He’s thinned out the feedstock of the fire beast, the copious bush, thick groups of tree saplings (known to firefighters as “dog hair”), along with dead and downed vegetation on the forest floor. These are items the fire beast would bolt down, and then run hell-roaring, hurling out a flame-front that firefighters fear and may directly attack with temerity. Their safest tactics would be to cautiously flank the fire at the expense of seeing homes burn, but providing for firefighter safety first.
Peter Chesko in front of his fuel reduced property.
Starting small, Peter first cut a path through the thick, heavy ten-foot tall manzanita a short distance from his homesite. Using this as his first avenue of defense, he anchored his work from this path, widening it, thinning his brush, oak, and pines plus raising the canopy skirts a safe height from the ground on his leave trees to lessen opportunities for ground fire to climb up into his tree tops and race away.
Now, Peter Chesko’s parcel is refreshingly and naturally park-like! The skinny pines and other species selected to remain due to their spacing, strong form, and good health are maturing, growing vigorous and stout. Oaks now offer a pleasant ambiance, wildlife forage, and safety. Among his trees and indigenous plants now grow a diversity of native wildflowers, herbs, and other plants that Peter meticulously thins and tends like a garden.
The most refreshing element of this narrative is Peter’s very positive demeanor, tenacity, and attitude. Even though in the last few years he’s had to hire help to climb his bigger trees and for doing some of the heavy work, Peter is the vigilant, diligent steward of his part of the world. He is a particularly outstanding inspiration to me, also considering the fact that he has courageously struggled with an adversary that has badgered him since the day he was born, cerebral palsy.
Guest Editorial: December 2010 by Dale Nova, Co-Facilitator of the Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council
BEFORE photo prior to fuel reduction treatment depicts a home off Cantara Road drowning in a sea of potentially highly explosive fire fuel, given an ignition source and bad fire weather.
AFTER photo profoundly profiles a presently much more fire-safe homestead that is now much more defensible from wildfire consuming it while affording firefighters a safer opportunity suppress it.
Thanks to a substantial grant from the U.S. Forest Service, the South Mt. Shasta city area is now more fire-safe. The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council recently completed Phase I of an impressive fuel reduction project in the area, helping establish a shaded fuelbreak in the lower Little Big Canyon drainage near the intersection of South Old Stage Road and Cantara Loop Road. Additionally, several homes and structures along Snowblower Lane received defensible space fuel reduction treatment. Also both sides of the adjacent Union Pacific railroad tracks, from past railroad-owners a very significant source of many wildfire ignitions, received fuel reduction within the 300 feet wide shaded fuelbreak. Nearly a half-mile of fuel reduction was accomplished along Union Pacific Railroad’s paralleling service road to not only create better access for fire-safe work crews, but also enhance quicker, safer response time for fire suppression forces into the populated area during a wildfire event.
Phase II of this project has already been instigated, although work has been hampered recently by recent snowfall. The fuelbreak construction is to continue all the way to Interstate 5, to the backyards of homeowners in the Sun Mt. Subdivision, combined with a shaded fuelbreak presently being constructed in Big Canyon from the Union Pacific railroad tracks north to I-5, then downhill paralleling I-5 (another very high frequency wildfire source from motor vehicles) and also progressing south, paralleling Union Pacific railroad tracks.
Ultimately, this fuel reduction project will effectively help keep wildfire from the doors of hundreds of homes in the South Mt. Shasta area, and in a catastrophic wind-driven wildfire event, hopefully keep one from racing into the greater Mt. Shasta City area.
The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe council has some strong partners in this worthy endeavor. Besides the U.S. Forest Service and their generous financial support, Cal Fire? has provided California handcrews, technical, and professional expertise. The Fire Safe Council of Siskiyou County is a key partner along with Union Pacific Railroad, with both organizations providing expertise. Siskiyou County Public Works Department has also partnered with provisions of landline survey and road traffic control assistance.
Also this project has created dozens of jobs. Summitt Forests, Inc., with the majority of its employees from Siskiyou County, provided all the handcrew work in Phase I. Phase II fuelbreak mastication is being performed by Singleton (Clint) Construction of Montague, with majority all Siskiyou County employees.
Additionally, vendors are grateful to benefit from the many dollars of fuel, supplies, tools, and other goods purchased to help complete the project, which will also help the sustainability of Siskiyou County’s fragile economy, while helping to keep those vendors’ employees more gainfully employed.
HOMEOWNERS CAN BE MORE FIRE SAFE BEFORE WILDFIRES ARRIVE
A Guest Editorial by Dale Nova and Richelle Hubble, August 2010
A swift, wind-driven fire hit consumed 11 houses and damaged 4 others recently in Ashland. Oregon Department of Forestry’s Brian Ballou was quoted in the Mail Tribune regarding the intensity and rapid spread of the wildfire, “The bottom line is that there was a continuous string of fuel from the north to south end.” The wildfire was allegedly caused by an inebriated transient, who was later apprehended. Unfortunately, an event such as this could happen anywhere in Siskiyou County, particularly in Mount Shasta where high-density housing is the norm and the area is vulnerable to human-caused wildfire causes due to proximities to the I-5 corridor, railroad lines, logging practices, high recreation use, and brush-surrounded Mott Airport.
Half the battle is educating homeowners to be fire-safe; the other half is putting that knowledge into action. The Mt. Shasta Area Fire Safe Council (MSAFSC) has assertively embraced these tasks for 8 years now. In 2003, funded by a $48,000 U.S. Forest Service grant, MSAFSC collaborated to produce a Mt. Shasta Community Wildfire Protection Plan, lauded by fire agencies as a highly valuable tool. The MSAFSC has joined forces with numerous homeowners on fire-safe projects. Recently, another U.S. Forest Service-funded grant for the MSAFSC will begin this autumn on fuelbreak construction and residential defensible space in the South Mt. Shasta area. Our bottom line—homeowners need to step up to the plate and now do their part by taking care of making their properties more fire-safe for their safety, their neighbors, and their community.
There are many ways to be fire-safe that would help prevent wildfires but also decrease the amount of damage should one occur. Simple actions such as clearing pine-needle filled rain gutters, storing firewood safely—not against the side of one’s home, using fire-resistant building materials and landscape plants are big helps. A 100-foot minimum fuel-reduced defensible space around homes and other permitted structures is state law. Dale Nova, joint facilitator to the Mt. Shasta Are Fire Safe Council, estimates that a very large percentage of Mt. Shasta area residents are NOT in compliance. Not only will this action help protect your home and the lives of firefighters, but can also prevent the domino effect that occurred in Ashland, where fire jumped from tree to tree then house to house to house. Clearing dry fire fuels from around your home and removing the lower branches of trees to help prevent a fire from climbing into the tree’s canopy, and then jumping from these burning adjacent trees to roofs is all too common and deeply tragic scenario.
For better fire-safe education and on-the-ground counseling, there are multiple fire agencies at your disposal. The best way to start is to contact your local Fire Safe Council today! Monthly meeting dates and times are available at <firesafesiskiyou.org> or call Giselle or Dale Nova at (530)926-2089.
Second Anniversary of Mt. Shasta Are Fire Safe Council Potluck
Images from September 2, 2004 Mountain Thin Project Field Trip.