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Home and landscape wildfire defense: lessons learned from the 2017 California wildfire season: Webinar

How could have so many homes and businesses burned so quickly in the Wine Country Fires? While the landscape can be the fuse, the homes really can be the most burnable part of the landscape. For this webinar we’ll talk about key lesson that can be learned from these northern California fires and how we can help our homes and landscapes to become more resilient to wildfires. This webinar will bring forward information about fire preparedness, building design, construction and maintenance in with an emphasis identifying and managing the fuels near our homes (e.g. combustible wood mulches used in landscaping, lawn furniture, leaf accumulations, dry landscape plants, etc.), especially in the 5 feet immediately adjacent to our homes.

View PDF of PowerPoint Slides >

View journal article PDF > “Housing arrangement and vegetation factors associated with single-family home survival in the 2018 Camp Fire, California”

Resources mentioned in the Webinar:

Resources from the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resource
UCANR Wildfire page >
UCANR Factsheet on Home Landscaping for Fire
UCANR Factsheet on Home Survival in Wildfire-Prone Areas

Resources from CAL FIRE CA Building Code Chapter 7A on WUI construction
http://www.fire.ca.gov/fire_prevention/fire_prevention_wildland_codes ➢ http://osfm.fire.ca.gov/codedevelopment/wildfireprotectionbuildingconstruction

 

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About the Presenter

Yana Valachovic (val-a-ko-vik) is the County Director – Forest Advisor for University of California Cooperative Extension in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. She is a registered professional forester and forest scientist whose skills and interests cover a wide set of natural resource fields. She is currently the co-lead of the Northern California region of the California Fire Science Consortium. She has co-authored papers in fire behavior in coastal California forests and in the intersection of fire performance in home and landscape design.  With the 2017 North Bay fires she has been leading UC Cooperative Extension’s education work in fire building performance and is keenly interested in helping communities learn to build smarter.