Local residents urged to provide input in developing Community Wildfire Protection Plans.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
During the past few weeks, little publicized community meetings have been taking place in Malibu and neighboring communities to gather input on wildfire prevention strategies and fire safety.
The meetings are a joint effort by the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the National Park Service and ForEverGreen Forestry, a fire safety advocacy group, to develop a Community Wildfire Protection Plan for approximately 100,000 acres of the Santa Monica Mountains, including large areas in Malibu.
The plan is a federal vehicle for communities to identify priority actions, for wildfire prevention (i.e. brush clearance, planting native, low-fuel vegetation) and fire safety (including mapping evacuation routes) on both public and private lands, devised with input by local stakeholders.
More public meetings are scheduled to take place in Malibu during the next few weeks.
“Malibu has suffered its share of fires over the past several years,” Tracy Katelman, a spokeswoman for ForEverGreen Forestry, said. “A CWPP [Community Wildfire Protection Plan] will help specific neighborhoods with specific knowledge of problems in the area to develop plans to minimize risk.”
The Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area covers a patchwork of public and private lands and the 20-unit CWPP plan is centered on access points and watershed boundaries. The plans are designed to be frameworks for neighborhoods to form Fire Safe Councils, which can then apply for federal grants to help them achieve the suggestions the plans recommend.
Dick Guttman, a veteran film publicist and Malibu resident, attended a CWPP meeting with his wife, Gisela. He said he thought the idea was “a good first step,” but that no plan would mean much without enforcement provisions.
“My house burned down in 1993 and we have evacuated from wildfires at least 12 times,” Guttman said. “So I know about wildfire. The problem is that much of Malibu West, where I live, is primed for fire and the city council won’t do anything to enforce any regulations for brush clearance.”
Though experts in firefighting and land management figure largely in the development of any plan, Katelman said that local input is vital in consideration of geographic idiosyncrasies, road and landscape conditions and population.
In working out a plan for Topanga, for example, the group ended up dividing the town into four areas and asking residents in each of the different sectors to provide specific input to devise clearance priorities and evacuation routes.
For the past several years, the county fire department has sent notices to local homeowners, reminding them to clear brush from their properties and trim trees to avoid the losses Malibu has experienced from wildfire over the past decades.
Katelman proposes to further refine those instructions by identifying what type of vegetation should be encouraged and which type avoided.
“The old pines and eucalyptus trees are particularly fire-prone, especially when they create choke points with overhangs,” Katelman said. “You don’t always have to remove them entirely, just prune them so that the fuels are separated.”
Katelman said that brush clearance has less to do with clearing away ubiquitous brush like chaparral, than trimming it appropriately and keeping it clear within 200 feet of a home. She advocates keeping native vegetation like Manzanita and chaparral because their deep-root systems prevent turf erosion, and they can also be trimmed to look aesthetically pleasing.
The Guttmans, who recently removed about 20 palm trees from their property as a fire-safety measure, lamented the number of myoporum (an ornamental, non-native flowering tree) around the property that appear to be dead or dying, due to drought and blight.
“My friend who is a firefighter told me it’s like an ammo dump,” Guttman said. “Why aren’t they being removed? I’m all for fire safety plans, if they have some teeth to them.”
Captain David Enriquez, at Malibu’s Fire Station number 88, concurred that myoporum in the area is suffering from blight. He said that if damaged trees are found on private property, they would be subject to request for removal; but that trees on public property fell under the auspices of a number of state and local agencies.
“All private property is subject to inspection for brush clearance compliance,” Enriquez said. “The problem is a lot of people don’t realize that their ornamental shrubbery can be a tinderbox. If you have a 25-year-old bougainvillea that has never been cleared of its underlying dead leaves, it’s a problem. You need to maintain your ornamental plants as well as the native shrubbery.”
Katelman said that the public meetings for area residents would take place through January, with a draft proposal for the entire Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area to be prepared in April. For residents interested but unable to attend meetings, on-line mapping can be found on the web site, www.firesafecouncil.org, along with basic fire safety information and the opportunity to provide input.