Fire Safe Roads April 2021
With fire season again approaching after another year of drought, it is time for mountain dwellers to consider how to protect themselves and their property from damage. But when fires attack their homes, they need an escape route, of which there are two main choices: Summit Road and Soquel San Jose Road. It was lack of a navigable escape route that cased such loss of life in the Paradise fire two years ago. Skyland Church, under the direction of Larry Lopp, has been coordinating local efforts to prepare for fires and keep the escape route along Summit Road open. In fact, Skyland church hosts the local fire safe county roads website on the church’s own website; it may be accessed at https://skylandchurch.com/fire-safe-county-roads/.
At the website you will find a wealth of information about the county’s multi-agency approach to fire protection. It also contains a valuable 3-minute video by Al Feuerbach and Anne Evans, with narration by J.R.Call, then hazardous fuel reduction manager for the Santa Clara County Fire Safe Council, about the demonstration project at the Loma Prieta School and the plans for removing flammable vegetation from Summit Road. In it you can see some examples of massed vegetation, and others of what an area properly cleared of fuel looks like. Clearly, Summit Road will not look the same when it is made fire-safe.
Before that condition can be achieved, however, much work needs to be done, and before that work can be done, the 148 property owners along Summit need to sign permission slips for their property to be cleared, and money needs to be raised to do that clearing. It’s a project that would tax the talent of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists responsible for the Running Fence through Sonoma County that took four years to build counting the permits and environmental reports required to build it. Larry and the assembled team have been working on fire safe county roads for 18 months and hope to get clearing work begun this summer.
Christo took his fence down after it had been displayed for two weeks, and left its path completely cleared, without a trace of the fence. The Summit project will self-destruct all by itself, in that vegetation will eventually return on its own, and will have to be kept down in order to maintain fire-safe conditions. The project when completed would like to see this ongoing effort funded and carried on by a public agency as part of providing transportation equity to our rural mountain citizens.
So far, according to the latest published Alliance progress report (December 2020) from the Fire Safe County Roads project, only 69 percent of the property owners have provided email addresses; a new progress report is due April 4, and Larry says that the number of addresses is now just over 70 percent and it is imperative that we get to full participation to make the corridor fire safe.
He is the director of the Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance, our local 501 C4 and is receiving essential support from a number of county and state organizations as well as many community individuals interested in preserving life and property.
* Former county Supervisor John Leopold was the first to suggest a pilot demonstration at the Loma Prieta School, which has been completed. This was followed up with two aggressive demo projects The Summit – Highland way corridor and The Soquel San Jose Corridor. These demo projects will take several years and develop the funding sources, organizing skills and tools and work force to continue this public supported part of our county road system.
* Leopold’s successor, Manu Koenig, has followed up on Leopold’s start and taken an interest in the necessary planning for Soquel San Jose Road Corridor. In mid-March his office announced plans for the PG&E to fund and place underground the PG&E wires on the lower half of this road. Such wiring, stretched through trees, has been the ignition source for many of California’s recent wildfires.
* San Mateo/Santa Cruz Cal Fire determines the scope of the local project, files the environmental reports, and assists in grant writing.
* Santa Cruz County Resource Conservation District (RCD) will write grant requests and obtain funding, and hire and supervise the field crews who will do the work.
* Santa Clara County Fire Safe Council will help as needed. Forty-two percent of the affected parcels on Summit are in Santa Clara County, and the Fire council has experience from a 2020 Highway 17 shaded fuel break project. The current FSCR program led by The Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance will clear both sides of Summit Road, including the properties in Santa Clara County.
* State Sen. John Laird is working on a 10-year legislative program on fire prevention, of which a draft is expected from his office in a few weeks.
Work on Summit Road is called a “shaded fuel break,” meaning that it takes place where natural fires have been suppressed and there is a dangerous buildup of flammable vegetation. The process entails removing the combustible underbrush and small closely spaced trees and trimming the lower branches on larger, more fire-tolerant trees, which will be left in place. This process creates a low fuel-shaded space where ground fire travels slowly and fire does not ladder up to the crowns on larger trees. As the underbrush is cut, it will be chipped and left in place, spread over the ground no more than six inches thick. Standing dead trees and trees hanging over the roadway will be felled; all downed logs will be removed.
Skyland members who are essential to moving this work forward include David Fullagar, (mapmaker), Lou McTamaney, (data master), Al Feuerbach and Anne Evans, who made the video, Thomas Sutfin (forester), Gerry Alonzo, Nancy Jo Lopp, and Jeremy Cole.
