jImportant steps you can take are those to prepare your home to resist wildfires. This constitutes two area, hardening your home and making your surrounding yard fire resistant. Wild fires are spread by wind-blown embers that can travel a mile or more. To protect your home against embers, you need to harden your residence and clear defensible space around it. The most proactive action a resident can take is to prepare their property to resist the onslaught of a wildfire. There are two aspects to this work; home hardening and defensive space preparation. There are a multitude of resources available to guide you in either or both of these activities.
Home hardening refers to modify the physical aspects of your home so that it is protected from the incursion of embers and fire. This can include modifying vents, replacing siding or roofing, and other such activity.
Defensive space preparation refers to modifying the landscaping of your property to make it harder for wildfire to reach your home and those of your neighbors. This can include restrictions on fire-prone plants and shrubs close to your residence, trimming trees that overhang your roof, removing limbs on trees up to 6′ from the ground, and other such activity.
Marin County Fire and Fire Safe Marin have published extensive information on how you can create defensive space and harden your house to survive a wildfire. There are excellent tutorials and videos regarding what you can do to achieve both ends. Among them are Harden Your Home and Create a Fire Smart Yard, both on the Fire Safe Marin website. Two excellent checklists that can help you in this regard are the Ember Awareness Checklist and How To Prepare Your Home for Wildfires.
Some additional material if you want to dive even deeper include Fire Safe Marin’s brochure titled Homeowner’s Guide to Wildfire Preparation in Marin County.
Wildfire Risk Assessment
In July 2019, the Marin County Fire Department did a lot-by-lot fire risk assessment in Bayside Acres and left a checklist in your mailbox of ways to harden houses and create defensible space. Those materials were distributed to 140 of the 163 Bayside Acres homes. Seventy of those residences had no identified fire risks. Note, however, that those inspections identified only obvious hazards, and in some cases were only cursory since they had to be done from street-level when the inspector could not enter the property.
Marin Fire will be happy to return to your property and do a thorough follow-up inspection when you are present to provide complete access. These return inspections will be grouped to allow the inspector to serve several properties, so please be flexible. Contact the Marin County Defensible Space Coordinator at defensiblespace@marincounty.org. You won’t be forced to correct identified hazards. The objective of these inspections is to inform you and encourage you to act.
Whether or not you ask for a follow-up inspection, you should use the checklist for create defensive space and the checklist for harden your house to make your own, more thorough assessment.