There are a number of ways to stay fire wise in areas like Southern California that have a higher risk of wildfire no matter the time of year. Sometimes mitigating the risk of fires breaking out in a certain area might fall on the responsibility of homeowners and community planners, who have more power than they might think when it comes to preventing fires from starting in the first place.
One of the reasons that the Camp Fire in Paradise, California was so devastating was, in part, due to a bill that had just passed in 2018 that opted to treat wildfires like other natural disasters in that they would finally allow appropriate funding to go to the communities that needed help getting back on their feet after the devastation. The Wildfire Disaster Fund for California was then established to be available starting this year, in 2020. 2018, the same year the bill was passed, also happened to be the worst fire season that California had seen in decades, expressing the explicit need for such a bill to come into fruition.
Homeowners and community planners can help prevent wildfires by coming together to identify potential risks in their area and make the necessary changes in order to diminish those risks as much as possible. There are tons of risks that put you and your home at greater risk of sparking a wildfire, especially in California where wildfire season is, essentially, all year long. There are certain habits and physical changes that you can make to assure that things in your neighborhood are safe and risk free.
Things like ensuring that your local community is taking preventative measures like trimming trees around electrical lines or educating the community on how to prevent a fire properly are among just a few of the things that can help prevent wildfires in your area. When communities come together to focus on fire safety, they can often help prevent wildfires from breaking out altogether.
In some cases, though, fires still start. Local communities can still come together to assure that their communities are taken care of in the event of a wildfire by assuring that funds can be allocated to community re-building and taking care of any infrastructures that have been destroyed by fire. If a few members of a community suffer at the hands of a wildfire, they don’t have to be alone as long as their community as a whole has put resources into local and state legislation that make it easier to bounce back in the event of a catastrophe.
