Fire is one of the most fearsome forces threatening residents on Santa Barbara’s South Coast and even for me, living in the Santa Ynez Valley. I have twice been evacuated. Quickly gathering up a few valuables and struggling to get my animals out as fierce winds whipped flames on the horizon has made fire a haunting concern.
As with any fear, the best strategy is to confront it. So I joined the board of Santa Barbara County’s Fire Safe Council, whose mission is to promote wildfire safety through education and action. The Fire Safe Council is sponsoring a two-day exposition on Saturday, October 14 and Sunday, October 15 at Direct Relief’s Goleta headquarters so that all of us can learn more about the state-of-the-art fire mitigation work being done along the South Coast.
The Fire Safe Council has a key role in one of the most cutting-edge efforts underway anywhere in the country, the Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program Santa Barbara (RWMP), which is focused on the entire South Coast front country and the brainchild of council board member and UC Santa Barbara Professor of Fire Ecology and Management Max Moritz. The RWMP is an ongoing program with $5.5 million in start-up funds from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to create a framework to transform the front country into a fire adapted region. The RWMP targets three areas for increased resilience — the community, built environment, and landscape. The Fire Safe Council leads the community work, the Community Wildfire Planning Center leads on the built environment, and the Spatial Informatics Group leads the landscape work, the most innovative and custom-built for our particular region.