by Doug Crawford

On May 8, as part of wildfire preparation week, Senator Mike McGuire hosted the kickoff of the wildfire preparation webinar series.  These webinars are well run and cover a range of wildfire related topics. This particular session covered important wildfire preparation topics, as well as some info about the California property insurance crisis too. 

I was impressed by the significant efforts by the state of California (mostly via CAL FIRE) to significantly build up its firefighting resources over the last several years. The webinar has been recorded, and can be found here. The first 15 minutes of the webinar covers the numbers about the amount of equipment, firefighters, various aircraft, and other related actions that have been put in the place since the tragic fires that started several years ago.  One of the most interesting points was that California now has the largest firefighting efforts of any government entity in the world, which brings the most resources possible for wildfire response to our homes and neighborhoods- including our beautiful BV community.  

It was also valuable to get an update about the property insurance crisis, although it was not the primary point of the Wildfire webinar. Throughout the webinar, there is some good information provided- including very practical tactical actions that can be taken by each and all of us to make our homes safer and hopefully prevent fires from having a disastrous impact on both our individual lives and our BV Community.  

Another important point of the webinar was about creating Firewise communities. One of the key points of the webinar was for both insurance purposes, as well as getting through a wildfire fire disaster, how both home hardening and creating defensible space is most effective when done by an entire neighborhood area. While it may benefit an individual home owner, and they encourage taking all the defensible actions and home hardening actions possible, and it’s really a matter of having all the homes in an area band together and implement the fire wise practices.  Based on a CAL FIRE test being run in Kelseyville, in Lake County, they hope to identify how much impact these programs have on firefighters being able to save more homes, when a wildfire approaches any particular neighborhood. 

This webinar does point out the need to create an overall fire program for our Bennett Valley community, which would likely (because of wide geographic BV area) result in multiple neighbor cells, who would coordinate on gaining the funding from the various Firewise programs- by working with the related agencies to receive the grants for implementing the related actions necessary.  

From reading this, if it activates you to listen to the webinar, click the link above. And if you’re interested in participating in the launch of a BV Firewise program—please reply here.  Based on the responses received, the level of interest in establishing a Firewise group to coordinate these efforts across the entire Bennett Valley area, will be known.   

The best news in the webinar, in addition to the near doubling in the number of firefighting resources that have been added, is with the higher-than-average rainfall of the last two years, that’s expected to create a delay in start of the 2024 wildfire season. 

However, it was very clear these rains also created a lot of vegetation growth and should a wildfire start, there is much more fuel to burn now.  The key point:  Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security it will be OK this year to not be completely ready for a wildfire event, right here in BV.  Hopefully this is not the case, as we are experiencing climate change, our best actions are to be fully prepared, well in advance. 

Link to Mike McGuire’s other videos here on his library site. 

 Story credit (final revised): Doug and his wife, Chris, are owners of a horse ranch in the Bennett Valley area and offer their equine-guided EQ2 Leadership™ and team building programs to business leaders and their team members. Doug can be reached at office@eq2leadership.com