If wildfire struck here tomorrow… next week… next month… would you be caught unprepared?

Community Fire Preparedness Meeting
Saturday, April 9, 10 a.m.
PMC Clubhouse
All mountain residents are urged to attend!

By Marcy Axness, TME

The threat of wildfire has always been part of forest life. The risk has mounted in a new era of extreme weather driven fires, and while the specter of firestorms now reaches into residential areas far from the forest, it is part of basic due diligence here for residents to understand wildfire risk and do what they can to prepare.

At Saturday’s Community Fire Preparedness meeting, after a 12-minute film, residents will have ample time to ask Kern County Fire Department personnel about property clearance details and other basics.

Dayne Yancey, one of the CERT co-organizers, said property clearance questions for firefighters typically abound at this event.

Concerns like, “What do I do about my neighbor’s yard, which is a mess?” or “What do I do with the growth behind me, which is national forest land?” are common, Yancey said.

New Residents, This is for You

“We’re hoping, because we’ve had such an influx of new people,” Yancey said, “that people who are new to living here will come.” She added, “People who have lived here a while should know all this.”

But refreshers are always a good thing.

No Scare Tactics Here

The prospect of wildfire near our homes is understandably daunting to contemplate. Many may prefer to sweep the entire idea under the comfy rug of denial.

But there are many great community resources available to help you step gingerly out of the head-in-sand space and toward becoming better equipped and more resilient in the event of a disastrous wildfire or other calamity.

“Scaring people into action doesn’t always work in the best way,” said Christian Erickson, FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Administration] Community Preparedness Officer, as he spoke at Kern Fire Safe Council’s community-wide webinar on March 22.

He was referring to some disaster readiness campaigns that take a harsher, full-immersion approach, like, “Be prepared, there can be a fire or earthquake at any moment!”

Hope and Practical Tools

In Erickson’s experience, “People tend to react better when you’re speaking from a place of hope and connectedness, of community, rather than a place of fear.”

His FEMA colleague Vincent Martinez finds that for people to take action on information, the information must resonate with them, which leads to truer understanding, which is more likely to inspire action.

One way that information can resonate and move people is when it is very practical and applicable to their lived experience. When Kern Fire Safe Council first hosted the FEMA officials Erickson and Martinez on their monthly webinar, they helped attendees imagine, given a post-disaster scenario, just how much a bit of simple advance preparation would make some aspects of recovery so much smoother during a time when daily life would be deeply challenging. The emphasis was on small, doable actions that can be considered works in progress rather than daunting massive projects that must be accomplished to perfection in one fell swoop.

One tool that is free for the asking, and can help you build the kind of resiliency the FEMA folks were discussing, is the…(please see below to view full stories and photographs)

Photo captions:

The Grand fire began as a spark on the side of Frazier Mountain Park Road in Lebec at about 1 p.m., May 15, 2013, and exploded into a 2,500 acre wildland inferno by 3:30 p.m. It was declared contained seven days later after burning 4,346 acres.

FEMA officials at Kern Fire Safe Council’s January webinar, ‘Financial Resiliency,’ gave practical first steps for actions to begin building a foundation to provide for less stress and more ease, efficiency and progress in the event of any kind of disaster, including wildfire.

One baby step: Take photographs of key documents like these, put them on an external or flash drive and store them with a trusted friend, in the cloud or in a safe deposit box, so they exist in a location separate from your home. Just one small thing, but the thing is, begin!

This free tool for disaster resilience is provided by FEMA. To have a hard copy mailed to you, call 800.480.2520 and ask for publication P-1075. It is also available as a pdf download at ready.gov/financialpreparedness. This pdf accommodates typing in much of the information rather than handwriting, which some may prefer (but then you must print the pages out to have with you in your emergency materials).

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This is part of the April 8, 2022 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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