With the arrival of the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program, many communities are starting their community wildfire protection plans (CWPPs) now, and many other communities are dusting theirs off from the shelf to begin their updates. Our CWPP represents an unexpected saga that I hope other wildfire survivors can learn from.
I knew nothing about wildfire mitigation when the Valley Fire hit Lake County, California on September 12, 2015. It burned down my house and two-thirds of my neighborhood alone, and to this day occupies dubious standing among the top twenty most destructive in our state. In the previous months, two major wildfires had already occurred in our county. As I bent with other survivors to help clean up and rebuild, I wondered what might have been missed ahead of time at the county level. Surely, I thought fleetingly, there must be a process or plan that could have helped prevent so much catastrophic destruction.