Cut the wildfire risk around our homes
We all watched the hills this summer. The question is what gets cleared before the next one.
Rancho Santa Margarita is built against open country. That is the appeal, and it is also the risk. Fire agencies think about this in zones that start at the wall of the house and work outward, and every zone has someone responsible for it.
The nearest zone is the property’s own. CAL FIRE puts the first five feet around a building at the top of the list, ahead of the hillside, because that is where an ember lands and finds something to burn. A city council cannot clear that strip for you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The outer zones are a different matter. The slopes above the tract, the trail edges, the flood channel and the common area sit across city land, SAMLARC land, individual associations and private owners, with Orange County Fire Authority inspecting. That is a lot of separate hands on one hillside. I want a resident standing below it to be able to find out, in one place, when it was last cleared and whose job it was. Getting that assembled is council work, and it is what I will push for.
The work already happening is OCFA’s, RSM CERT’s, the Firewise neighborhoods’ and that of every resident who spends a Saturday on their own slope. I am not running against any of them. I want their work visible on a schedule residents can look up, and funded as standing infrastructure so it never has to compete for attention.
This is the other half of the insurance problem, and it is the half that matters at two in the morning. The bill is on its own page.
What I will do
- Get the fuel-management work the city and SAMLARC already do published in one place, on a map, so a resident can look up their own slope and see when it was last cleared and who is responsible for it.
- Fund brush clearance and defensible space as recurring infrastructure rather than as a discretionary line.
- Make Zone 0, the first five feet around a house, something the city actively helps residents with, not a pamphlet.
- Keep evacuation routes and the roads that feed them clear, and ask what happens to them when a fire starts on a weekday afternoon.
- Back OCFA, RSM CERT and the Firewise neighborhoods with whatever the city can give them, and get out of their way.