Crews started work this week on a 60-mile-long, continuous shaded fuel break that will encircle both incorporated and unincorporated Novato as a protective cushion against wildfires.
The 200- to 300-foot-wide break will skirt 5,200 residences on the area’s outer edges and cover more than 3,400 acres.
Shaded fire breaks remove some understory trees and vegetation while retaining tree canopies. The shade from the canopies helps preserve moisture in potential ground fuels.
Mark Brown, executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Protection Agency, announced Monday that it has secured a $2.6 million grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to help complete the multi-year project. The county agency is investing $500,000 of its own funds in the project, and Conservation Corps North Bay recently received a $374,000 grant to work on it as well.
“A shaded fuel break is not designed to stop a fire,” Brown said. “It is designed to modify the fire’s behavior, decrease its rate of spread, decrease its intensity. That will give our residents time to evacuate and a safer environment in which to evacuate. It also provides an opportunity for firefighters to suppress the fire.”
Contractors participating in the project gathered in Novato on Tuesday to be trained to implement the required environmental mitigations accompanying the effort.
“Every contractor and their employees have to go through a mandatory training on environmental issues, safety and protection of cultural resources,” said Mike Swezy, vegetation program manager with the Novato Fire Protection District.
Some 40 participants received the training on Tuesday.
“We have a couple of tree service companies that handle bigger tree projects,” Swezy said. “And we have Forster and Kroeger, which is a landscape contractor. They do a lot of the brush work, which is most of the fuel break work.”
The Marin County Fire Department’s four hand crews and participants in the department’s Fire Foundry program are also slated to work on the fire break, adding another 60 participants. Their training was scheduled for Wednesday. The Fire Foundry program is designed to increase racial and sexual diversity in the fire services.
On July 25, the Marin County Board of Supervisors gave its approval to include about 520 acres of county open space land in the fire break. The wildfire agency is working with the Marin County Open Space District and the Novato fire district to implement the project.
“MWPA from the very beginning has engaged the environmental groups to be a partner in this process,” Supervisor Dennis Rodoni said at the board meeting in July.
The California forestry board prepared a programmatic environmental impact report for the 1,228 acres of state-controlled land that will be included in the fire break. The Marin Wildfire Protection Agency prepared an addendum to that report for the 2,227 acres of locally controlled land that will be affected.
“My understanding is that the environmental community is impressed with the rigorous planning and the expertise brought to bear throughout the process,” said Belle Cole, a Marin Conservation League board member.
The environmental analysis of the project determined that all but two impacts could be mitigated to less–than-significant levels. The effects on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions will remain significant and unavoidable because of the equipment and pile burning planned for the project.
Nevertheless, the forestry board, as the lead California Environmental Quality Act agency, decided that the benefits of the project outweighed the potential unavoidable significant effects.
Required mitigations include avoiding the loss of certain vulnerable plants, avoiding harm to protected wildlife and preserving oak woodlands and protected wetlands.
“One of the reasons we waited until Aug. 1 to start this project is due to the nesting season of the northern spotted owl,” Brown said. “One of the primary foods of the spotted owl is the wood rat. So we go out of our way to preserve wood rat nests.”
Swezy said, “This is go time between August and the end of January.”
Crews will create the fire break by means such as manual hand thinning, mowing, grazing, spot herbicide treatments and pile burning.
“The lion’s share of the work is really difficult hand labor using power tools,” Swezy said.
He said the terrain is too steep in most areas to use mowers.
Swezy said the crews will remove dead and down material, as well as the lower limbs of some trees to separate ground fuels from the tree canopy. He said crews will also remove invasive plants such as broom, acacia and eucalyptus as well as some smaller native trees.
The objective is to return the forest to the state it was in when fire occurred more frequently.
“Before we got so good at putting out fires,” Swezy said, “Marin’s woods consisted of large, widely spaced trees instead of the thickets that we have now.”
Close to 3,000 private properties are incorporated in the project. The wildfire agency has secured the permission of more than 300 owners so far.
“We get a right to enter signed by the resident for every piece of private property that we go onto,” Brown said.
Brown said he is unaware of any property owner objecting.
Brown said that because of the abundant winter rains, the moisture level of fire fuels in Marin is higher than in recent summers. He worries about the public being lulled into a “false sense of security,” noting that the wet season followed several years of drought.
“If you have normal winters and then have a really wet winter then you’re likely to have a decreased fire season,” Brown said. “But when you have drought for three or four years and you have a drought-busting rain, historically that is when we’ve had catastrophic fires.”
