The 2020 River Fire burned over 48,000 acres in Monterey County, CA. Credit: Jamie Tuitele-Lewis, RCDMC
Part I of Carmel Valley and TEX wildfire mitigation, education, and planning project
Learning to live with wildfire is a reality that the community of Carmel Valley, California is taking seriously! Together with Thriving Earth Exchange and partners from Monterey County’s Resource Conservation District, the Carmel Valley Association, Cypress Fire District, and CalFire, Carmel Valley is pursuing a wildfire education initiative to ensure that residents know how to be fire ready, fire safe, and fire resilient.
Community Wildfire Webinar Series:
In collaboration with Monterey County Fire Safe Council
Thursday, April 1, 5:30-6:30 pm PST
YouTube recording
Living with wildfire takes planning and preparation! This webinar addresses what you can do to make your home more resistant to wildfire.
Panelists:
Wednesday, April 14, 5:30-6:30 pm PST
YouTube recording
California law requires a minimum of 100 feet of defensible space around all structures in areas subject to wildfires; however, state guidelines acknowledge that depending upon such factors as topography and vegetation a greater distance may be needed to protect structures and lives from wildfire, and encourage “community-wide” defensible space. This webinar is designed to give you information on how to create effective defensible space to help protect your life and home, while complying with regulatory requirements.
Panelists:
Thursday, May 6, 5:30-6:30 pm PST|
YouTube recording
Over 100 years of the policy to suppress wildfires as quickly as possible has resulted in hazardous accumulations of wildfire fuels over much of the landscape. Wildfire fuels that would have burned did not because wildfires that would have burned them were put out. Panelists will be speaking about the changing fire conditions in California, what a fire-resilient landscape could look like, and mitigation of problem vegetation.
Panelists:
Thursday, May 13th, 5:30-6:30 pm PST
YouTube recording
Once a wildfire is approaching it is too late to plan. This webinar is designed to help you understand how to plan and prepare for wildfires before they start.
Panelists:
Thursday, May 13th, 5:30-6:30 pm PST
YouTube recording
Speakers discuss both the future of wildfire management and steps YOU can take to prepare yourself and your home for wildfire.
Panelists:
Do you have questions about what you heard on a webinar? Ask them here and get answers!
Carmel Valley is a census-designated place (unincorporated community) located in Monterey County, CA with a population of just over 4,000 residents. Located about 10 miles east of the beach city Carmel-by-the-Sea, Carmel Valley sits within the wildland-urban interface (WUI) where single family, multi-family, and rural residences intermingle with California chaparral and oak woodland ecosystems. Like many communities in California, the region has recently experienced devastating wildfire and residents live with uncertainty (and sometimes fear) as fire risks persist.
Though California dedicates many resources, personnel, and programs to wildfire mitigation, Carmel Valley residents want to take a more proactive role in building fire resilience into their community. As a first step, the community wants to ensure that all residents are knowledgeable about wildfire planning, what actions they can take to reduce fire risk, and how to access pre-, during-, and post-fire resources. Carmel Valley has experience coming together as a community to share knowledge and promote action in response to challenges such as the 2020 wildfire evacuations and Covid-19 pandemic. The community hopes to build upon this history of collective action to better prepare for and prevent devastation from future wildfires.
Thriving Earth Exchange has joined with Carmel Valley, CA for a two-part project that addresses the challenges of wildfire mitigation and education. In the first part of this project, we focus on wildfire education with the goal of developing a collective community knowledge of the local wildfire landscape, resource availability, and best practices for living with fire. There are two planned outputs for the educational project—a webinar series that will be recorded and posted online, and a wildfire fact sheet. The webinar series will include short talks by various wildfire experts (i.e., local fire district chiefs, CalFire fuels specialists, grant coordinators, wildfire scientists, invasive species specialists) followed by a Q&A session on the following topics: home hardening, defensible space, public safety/power, vegetation and the fire landscape, and emergency planning. We hope to begin scoping part two of the project with participants of the webinar series (possibly with surveys or polls) to identify additional wildfire-related community priorities that could be addressed with a scientific partnership. Once the series is complete, we plan to compile the major takeaways from the talks and disseminate them in short factsheets that can be distributed to the community. The community believes that a better understanding of the wildfire landscape, along with knowledge of the preventative actions that can be taken, will empower residents, reduce the fear and uncertainty of living with fire, and lead to a more fire resilient community.
Empowering residents to take control in facing wildfire risk: Building a proactive, informed, and prepared community was the goal for mitigating and reducing wildfire risk in Carmel Valley
Monterey County, located in central California about 140 miles south of San Francisco, has twelve distinct areas that offer an array of diverse geographies. Big Sur’s oceanside rocky cliffs, lush mountains, and coastal redwood forests make it hard to compete with Carmel-by-the-Sea’s white sandy beaches. While Salinas provides a look into California’s thriving agricultural industry nestled between mountains, Soledad offers sweeping vistas and hiking trails through Pinnacles National Park.
Read the full story here.
Community Leader: Meredith Nole
Coming soon!
Community Leader: Jamie Tuitele-Lewis
Jamie joined the RCDMC in November 2018. Jamie previously worked at the Sierra National Forest for the US Forest Service for 13 years as the Assistant Forest Botanist. Before that, he worked several seasonal positions for the Forest Service throughout Oregon, Washington and California. Jamie attended the University of Hawai’i at Manoa with a BA in Botany and then went on to achieve his MS in Forest Ecology at Oregon State University in 2004 with his thesis on the biology and ecology of Potentilla recta in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. His career has focused on the management of rare plants, invasive plant management, and large multi-resource project planning. He has worked in several aspects of wildfire response and fuels management activities while in the Forest Service.
Community Science Fellow: Katie Swensen
Katie is the Community Science Fellow and project manager on the Carmel Valley and Thriving Earth Exchange wildfire project. She grew up in the California East Bay Area, just a couple of hours north of Carmel Valley, and is currently a resident of Washington State. Katie a Ph.D. candidate at Washington State University in Vancouver, WA studying wildfire ecohydrology. In addition to her dissertation research, Katie’s wildfire background includes work with the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center as an assistant working group lead and co-author of their 2020 Eastside Wildfire Deep Dive workshop and report. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D. at Washington State University, she completed her M.S. in Geology at the University at Buffalo and her B.S. in Environmental Science at UC Davis.
Scientists: Various scientists serve as speakers in the webinar series of Part I of this project.
Part II scientist(s) TBD in Part II scoping/matching.
This project is supported by funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
