Residing in Ventura: A Manual for Fire Safety & Tree Care
Residing in Ventura means relishing bright skies, sea breezes, and enchanting vistas. With dry summers and wild underbrush, fire safety and protection in Ventura is not just smart—it’s vital, especially concerning your trees. Intuitively, trees might seem like clusters of barely-controlled infernos ready to happen… but with good practices and better care, they can figure prominently in your fire safety plan. Since 1999, Ventura residents have experienced nine major fires consuming homes, lives, and vast tracts of our landscape. The Thomas Fire of 2017 in particular was a well-documented, hair-raising experience of fire-driven devastation. The fire started just north of Ventura and burned both south and east.
The good people at Ventura County Fire Department (VCFD) and Area Urban Foresters (AUF) all contend with the same combination of risky heat and combustible winds.
Why Trees Are an Integral Part of Fire Safety & Protection in Ventura
You can’t control the weather, but you can control how your property is prepared for fire season. Trees too close to your home or in the fuel-heavy “combo zone” around it can put your home at increased risk during a fire or after a series of fires. But good tree management fortified by top-notch emergency landscaping during fire season—say the VCFD, AUF, and their colleagues—can go a long way toward making your property safer. Some of the most recommended strategies:
– Proper watering and plant selection can make trees within 30 feet of your home less likely to catch fire during high heat events like those fuels burning mentioned above, or if there are direct embers hurled toward them.
– Cutting overwrought trees back and clearing all that hazardous tree fuel canopy around your home makes trees in that dangerous half-circle less dangerous. (See this former Ventura County executive’s lonely house to the right? Three homes, no trees. It makes one column of hazardous view fuel trees like this at the top of the story spread out over half a mile.)
Most trees planted close to a home over the past 20 years should have been fire-smart trees, according to VCFD. Think of your home’s safety as a series of deforestation rings, which is what the latest in Ventura County’s array of scenic safety closures proposed around Union Oil’s Santa Paula venture has our fire strategists at AUF and VCFD thinking of instead: rows of trees, topped off with a public experience that was like being swallowed up by a freight train moving at 50-60 miles an hour.
