We at the Fire Safe Council were very happy with the Town Hall meeting last week. The turnout was great and the room was packed. Best of all was the intelligent and focused discussion between the fire chiefs who comprised the panel and residents who attended. The questions and comments were smart, and the chiefs…
We had a wonderful Goldspotted oak borer kick-off lunch this past Friday. The Fire Safe Council, with fantastic (and delicious) help from the Pine Cove Water District, sponsored a beautiful outdoor lunch behind the Mountain Resource Center to thank the volunteers who search the community for trees the Goldspotted oak borer infects. In addition to…
We had really bad luck in scheduling our Fire Prevention Muster, which just happened to fall on the only day in months with cold and wet weather. The bad weather forecasts for Saturday, April 26, were pretty firm by Wednesday, April 23, but Executive Director Edwina Scott’s final check was with U.S. Forest Service Division…
On Saturday, April 26, the public is invited to a festive and informative gathering in Idyllwild of people connected to fire prevention and firefighting. At no admission charge, we hope everyone will come and enjoy the activities. The Fire Safety Muster is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Idyllwild Community Center site in…
“Facts are stubborn things,” as John Adams said, and a very stubborn thing over the last two decades has been how much we have spent on putting out forest fires. Not surprisingly, wildfire protection costs have risen substantially. A recent paper from Headwaters Economics puts the federal annual-average fire suppression cost during the 1990s at…
Like a lot of people, I was fascinated by the almost complete shutdown of Atlanta from 2.3 inches of snow last week. It was a failure of government to manage a threat to public safety, which cost millions of dollars and some people their lives. But the actors were not irresponsible people. They thought they…
The Fire Safe Council began the year with its attention on the new insect threat to the Hill’s oaks, the Goldspotted oak borer. Many of our volunteers and staff attended a training program in January at the Nature Center led by experts from the Forest Service and University of California, Riverside. From that training came…
Now that the nights are cold and we wonder if the next storm will bring rain or snow, the threat of wildfire is greatly reduced. But though the threat of forest fire is diminished, the threat to an individual home has grown. More homes catch fire in winter than in any other season, and of…
Roof replacement going well … News about the Mountain Community’s Fire Safe Council’s reroofing program has appeared in this column before, but now that it is in full swing I think it’s worth going over in more detail. What with the Affordable Care Act web site working so poorly, I thought it a good time…
Wildfire is getting some prominent and fresh attention in major newspapers. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have published thoughtful articles this summer examining the larger issues involved. (They are catching up to this newspaper, which has had great reporting on fire for as long as I can remember.) It seems…
