Northern California was caught off guard by the Tubbs fire that ravaged Santa Rosa and endangered hundreds of lives and properties. The Kincaid fire was significantly better anticipated, but the associated destruction and evacuations left us all shaking in our boots. How can we better anticipate an almost certainly threatening fire season this year and beyond?
Cal Fire has a myriad of resources available to all of us. We strongly urge everyone, not matter your place of residence, to spend some time this July becoming familiar with wildfire preparedness, defensible space, and resources available to help you in the event of an evacuation and/or endangering wildfire.
• You can begin by taking this survey from Cal Fire to assess the risks of your home. They will auto-populate interactive preparedness checklists based on a brief survey and provide you with many tools to best prepare you and your family. Start here.
• Familiarize yourself with the idea of defensible space, the applicable zones, and how to best protect your home from stray sparks that are often the cause of a rapidly moving wildfire. This is great resource for how to create defensible space: https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-ready/defensible-space/
• We, again, want to reiterate the importance of subscribing to emergency alerts from you mobile device. The most well known is Nixle. To subscribe to Nixle for your area code simply text your area code to 888777.
• You can also subscribe to Cal Fire's Wildfire Alerts via text message. Fill out the form titled "Sign up for text messages" here.
• Build your go bag! You'll need copies of important documents, medications/prescription, among a long list of survival supplies. We'll be taking a deep dive into how to pack your go bag very soon, stay tuned!
Many of us know too well what it feels like to be caught unprepared, we're all in this together! Let's get prepared!