KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has certified a new vegetation treatment program that is set to help minimize Santa Clarita brush fires, as well as blazes across the state, officials said Thursday.
The California Vegetation Treatment Program is set to create efficiencies within the regulatory process to scale up fuel treatment and forest restoration projects toward meeting the state’s goal of treating 500,000 acres of non-federal lands annually, according to officials.
“I commend the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection for working with the environmental community, state regulators and public safety officials to develop a long-term solution to increase the pace and scale of critical vegetation treatment in a way that safely and responsibly protects our environment,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom. “The scale of the wildfire crisis in California is unprecedented, and we need a response to match the scale and severity of this challenge.”
The program provides California a new tool in its efforts to build wildfire resilience and improve long-term forest management in the face of climate change.
The California Vegetation Treatment Program helps minimize wildfires by having crews create fire breaks in vegetation near buildings, which would help prevent the structures from catching fire, according to officials.
To ensure necessary work could get underway immediately, the emergency proclamation suspended certain requirements and regulations as needed to carry out its directives, including the California Environmental Quality Act, according to officials.
As part of the long-term solution, CAL Fire developed the California Vegetation Treatment Program to enable projects to move forward efficiently while maintaining and protecting California’s diverse vegetation and habitats.
The program will help CAL Fire, and other public agencies comply with CEQA while delivering projects more quickly and affordably on over 20 million acres of land that is the responsibility of the state.
Projects that could benefit from the California Vegetation Treatment Program include:
Wildland-Urban Interface fuel reduction, including removal of vegetation to prevent or slow the spread of fires between wildlands and buildings.
Fuel breaks that support fire suppression activities by providing emergency responders with strategic staging areas and access to otherwise remote landscapes for fire control.
Restoration in ecosystems where natural fire regimes have been altered due to fire exclusion, including restoring ecological processes, conditions and resiliency to more closely reflect historic vegetative composition, structure and habitat values, according to officials.
The California Vegetation Treatment Program does not support commercial timber harvest or development.
To further achieve wildfire resilience in California, the state continues to work with federal partners, including the U.S. Forest Service.
The federal government owns nearly 58 percent of California’s forestlands, according to officials.
The state owns 3 percent, while 40 percent is privately held, according to officials.
To protect public safety and ecology, experts agree one million acres of California forest and wildlands must be treated annually across jurisdictions.
The federal government is working to match the state’s 500,000-acre annual treatment goals, though it has been hampered by years of federal budget and staffing cuts.
Governor Newsom has made wildfire prevention and mitigation a top priority since taking office, according to officials.
Newsom included $1 billion in additional funding in the state budget to enhance state and local Santa Clarita preparedness and expand firefighter’s capacity to respond to emergencies, according to officials.
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Since when did plastic become flre proof? I can see melted vinyl siding and fences from my back yard.
Houses on ridgetops are the problem. Nothing stops a wind driven uphill fire except a fuel break.
Seems some fool said CA should rake its forests like Finland does for fire prevention. Goats are a better solution for the CVTP. They are cheap and they haul away the brush, mostly. We are stuck, tho, with the fool.
Does all this mean we are going to start clearing brush like it was done years ago?
Looks like the author of this article simply repeated word for word the information provided by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. No one, it seems, took the effort to try and explain what some of the terminology means to the majority of us who don’t have a forest management/firefighting background.
OK, so it would appear some buildings will have increased fire breaks around them to help minimize damage. I see nothing in this program that will help minimize the intensity of brush fires being brought to the doorsteps of these buildings to begin with. As a matter of fact, it specifically mentions no support for commercial timber harvest or development. Forests are littered with years of dead and dying trees due to years of drought and insect infestation are they not? And aren’t dead or dying trees a major source of fuel for these fires?
Fire breaks are a great idea and long overdue. It’s ridiculous that it’s taken until 2020 for California to start implementing this age-old, yet effective measure. Notice I used the word measure and not solution. There are many more measures that the state of California should be taking to combat wildfires. However, I’m glad they are at least beginning by doing something that has been proven to be effective in several parts of the country.
History is repeating itself returning to the late sixties into the seventies. Firebreaks made with bulldozers or cutting them by hand, removing weeds along side of roads to reduce the possibility of carelessly discarded smoking materials or a vehicle fire. Controlled burns a few got out of control and that was the end of that. Environmentist did not like the scars on the land, and air quality managers did not like the air pollution. Also herbicides were used. That is all I recall. There is no stopping a wind driven fire. You give it the ole and try and catch it when the wind subsides. I-5 is a huge firebreak and you see how that works against a wind driven fire. By backfiring fighting fire with fire to have a control point, sometimes those backfired areas went sour, that has lead to not using that medium of control, and there is always lawyers there to sue should you loose your home.