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Which way does the wind blow?Are there prevailing winds? The areas directly affected by the wind should have a larger clearance. If the area has a strong afternoon wind pattern, the fire will probably follow that path, usually at a faster rate.
Look for sharp slopes below the house, these need low fuel landscaping for the distance proportional to the height and flammability of the plants on the slope. Flammable trees such as eucalyptus and pines need a 250'+ buffer if below a house. Eucalyptus look exactly like a 150 foot fireworks stand firing off.
Look at your wood pile, junk pile, storage area, hay stack, etc. and make sure it is in an open area (or inside a building) the sparks (or animals on fire) can not easily access. Try to position these with a 30'+ buffer from the house or garage.
If
your house has a shake roof or wooden walls
allow more clearance . (Like the state of Rhode Island) The heat from
the fire can ignite these and embers from the fire a mile away can
light every shake roof in the block. In the Fallbrook fire of 2002,
avocado leaves from nearby trees were picked up by the fire-generated
winds and pressed against the eves of the stucco/tile roofs. The
exposed rafters and curtains on the windows ignited most of the 40
houses that burned down. (Picture your house above a chimney after you
stupidly put the Christmas tree in the fireplace.) By the way, If
you're in one of these areas, change from fiberglass screens to metal
screens, maybe covering the entire window.
An overhead watering system should be considered to provide water to all plants within a 100'-150' radius from the house and other buildings. The plants need to have moisture in them when the firestorm comes. Watering dry plants as the fire approaches does not work. Since a wildfire can happen at anytime, weeds have changed the 'normal' fire season, you'll need to water lightly every two weeks if it doesn't rain. Wash the foliage off, but don't get the ground wet.
When I was a fireman I pumped water into a landscape fire before, used a 2 1/2 inch fire hose and watched the water vaporize long before it reached the plant material.
Weedy grasses, mustard, anise, broom and most other weeds can create a big problem. Even when weedeated, these fast, flashy fuels can catch you or firemen unaware that the fire is even near, never mind fifteen foot flames moving at 50 miles per hour. Mix the weeds with Chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum), Buckwheat (Eriogonum spp..), Black Sage(Salvia mellifera) and other drought adapted native plants, or non-native plants, (which are generally even drier and more flammable), and you have a bigger problem. Proper hygiene in the landscape will make you much safer. Dead grass acts as kindling, producing ten foot flames. This burning grass 'feeds' the bushes, which have 5'-30' flames, and these 'feed' your trees, which can put up a fire ball 75' tall and 50'+ wide. Weedy grass fires burn like the prairie fires in the old movies or gasoline. 20,000 acres in 20 minutes.Hard to describe unless you see it, one acre in a few seconds, 10 acres in a few more seconds, one hundred acres in 15 seconds. It looks like a gasoline fire on television, but a lot scarier.
Thinning out the flammable bushes and removing the dead grass or controlling the grass and weeds with sprays will make you more fire safe. Removing all 'brush' and replacing it with grass, is STUPID. The brush trade off is always erosion versus fire. Low density(the foliage has five to ten foot gaps between plants for shrubs, 50+ foot gaps on trees) are this compromise. Ice plant does not hold hillsides, its ecology is for the hillside to slip, which spreads the iceplant. Grasses also also have very shallow roots and are prone to slides. Most of the native brush burns slower than the plants you replace them with. A watered apple tree burns better than an unwatered Ceanothus.
Native leaf litter and thick organic mulch is ok only if it is clean, weed free, and has no big twigs (larger flame height) mixed in with it. Again, these act as kindling for the larger bushes. The mulch creeps and after a few days, can burn up your landscape. But the flame height is very low, shredded redwood or cedar bark have maybe a two inch flame height, with a 30 mile an hour wind on it. No wind, no flame. Jute matting has a foot and half flame on it if there is even a breeze or it is on a slope. If granite paths are used to break up the planting, and the house has a no burn 30 foot strip(concrete, lawn, patio, decomposed granite) around the house, no problem.
All the surrounding trees should be trimmed so that a man can walk under them. All the dead limbs should be trimmed out and removed.
The next area, 30-100' (larger in high wind areas or steep slopes), should be regularly watered as in 15 minutes a week for most native installations. Basically, as a general rule, this area needs to be cleared of 60-70% of the vegetation, leaving 30-40%, with large, mulched open spaces in between, weed-free.
To make a landscaping cheaper, more fire resistant, and more attractive it is desirable to put walkways throughout this area of the plantings. The walkways should be 4-5' wide; they can be gravel, brick , or concrete. The plantings then can be decreased in size to areas of 300-1000' sq. ft. . Less water is needed, and less maintenance, while the result is firebreaks throughout the planting. Most people are very happy with this because it gives access to the landscaping and makes a low maintenance landscaping even easier. Also, boulders do not fire well.
The third area is the 100'+ area and it needs to be cleaned up. Thin the brush and trees so that there is a 10' space between all plants 5' and over. The smaller plants can be left in clumps of 10' or less with 10-15' spaces between clumps. This gives a naturalized look to the landscape while it removes much of the potential fuel and makes what is there difficult to spread its flames. Do not forget to prune up trees and clean up the weeds. The residue after the clean-up should be 1" or less in size (no limbs). Before Europeans showed up with weeds, there were many spots of bare soil between the bushes. You could walk barefooted!
If
your house is below a slope try to have 15-20' between the bottom of
the slope and your home. A non-burning fence along the base of the
slope is also very helpful for catching embers, f lamming trees, and
rabbits on fire as they roll down
towards you. 
Try to make decks, sheds and other flammable items tight. That is, little or no cracks or openings. During a fire winds will push embers into those cracks and animals on fire can run into the openings or under your deck. In many fire situations the fire creates its own winds. Put the deck on the ground, close up any overhangs tightly, or make the spaces very open.(This will help to remove the kindling effect of pieces of dry wood; boards spaced one foot apart are much harder to light than ones one inch apart.) Can you stuff a garbage bag of burning avocado leaves under your deck? If you can you need to make your deck a patio of rock or concrete.
If you haven't built your house, and you're planning on a hilltop house in fire country, look at concrete block, no eves and a tile roof. Roll the house down the slope just a little out of the daily breeze.
Plan on not having any water. The electricity usually will go off if the fire is big. If the fire is large everybody, everybody will water down their roof, their weeds ,their walls etc.. Water systems are not designed to provide water for all at once. The people nearest the fire will have the least amount of water pressure because they are in the center of the overdrafting..
So again, do not plan on having water when a fire comes your way. Do your watering weeks before the fire. Your plants usually will act as a fire break. You'll lose your plants but not your house as the plants will pick up the radiant heat from the fire. Ceanothus can work very well for this. A watered apple tree burns better than an unwatered Ceanothus, a Ceanothus with the dust washed off occasionally is amazing.
Plan on being on your own when the fire goes through. In extensive fires there are not enough fire engines and firemen to help everybody at once. You may have no notice that there is a fire until it goes past you. That neighbor below that never weeds, likes to get drunk and barbecue on hot windy days?
If there is poor clearance firefighters can not be expected to protect your structure when they cannot protect themselves.(Drive-by fire protection.) You want the firemen to park next to your house. A safe place to park, access to a water source, maybe a refrigerator with cool drinks and sandwiches?
When a fire rolls through there is no time for you to do much but pack (in some causes 1 minute) and leave. Do not expect to have time to react otherwise. Preplan your escape and what you need to take with you. You can leave the horses in their corral, the safest place for them to be. Some of the folks in Fallbrook jumped in the pool when the fire blew through. You may need to step back into the house as the fire is already there, come back outside and put the spot fires out after the fire passes a few seconds later. I want you to able to do this safely.
Many
years ago a reporter from one of the local TV
stations interviewed me about this situation and his phrase was "IF YOU
DON'T LEARN, YOU'LL BURN" . This should be a slogan for fire areas.
Many of the sites were pristine before the fire and after until well intentioned but muddleheaded people decided they could do better. We should think long and hard before we try to be ecological stewards where we need not be. It is the ultimate in hypocrisy to stop all development in an area while sanctifying seeding a site after a fire. Planting the wrong plants into an ecosystem immediately after a fire destroys the ecology of a site. It will not recover.
An experiment by Mikola et al(1964) showed that intensive burning can somewhat delay the commencement of mycorrhizal infection, but not to a harmful degree. The moonscape sites after fires will usually revegetate in a few months if we do not interfere. Another aside is to note about soils and fire. I've heard a lot of people say they need to seed grass/barley after a fire because of the threat of erosion. Our experience and all the long term studies say this is not so. During the first major rain the native sites have high erosion, and after the third or fourth rain erosion ceases. The seeded grass comes up after the erosion stabilizes, after the third or fourth rain. And seeded slopes can burn early the next spring, non-seeded sites need years before they can burn again.
Fire is a natural occurrence in California. It will happen every 100-250 years in most sites. Plan for it. (We have a fire list that has more information.) Protect the native vegetation, it is what is holding your hillside together. Native plants have root structures that can grow more than 15 to 25 feet deep. This deep root structure brings moisture up to the surface root systems. After a fire this hydraulic lift provides moisture to the crown-sprouting shrubs, trees and their mycorrhizal associates. It is a beautiful sight to see green growth a few days to weeks after a fire.
The mycorrhizal grid(a finely woven matrix of friendly fungus) holds the surface together and remains intact after a fire. The strongest stabilizer on hillsides is probably this mycorrhizal grid. Mycorrhiza are what keep the sand dunes stable. The sand seems solid until you walk on it. When you walk on it, you disturb the mycorrhizal hyphae freeing up the sand from the hypha connections. The fungus is delicate but, when intact, it will hold the hillside together. (For dramatic pictures of this see Sharon Rose's 1988 article.)
If you think in terms of a human organism, the plant roots are the arms and the mycorrhiza are the fingers. Both are needed to hold the hillside together and they need to be working together for the hillside to be held. In relatively weed free sites(before the fire) disturbance needs to minimized. If the site was an unstable community before the fire, community specific pioneer wildflowers should be reintroduced as soon as possible after the fire. The erosion and restabilization of the soil on that site depends on a smooth and 'clean'(weed free) transition back to a native community. You have that first season to reestablish the plant and fungal community.
Increased frequency of fires(caused by the "blanket" seeding over huge watershed areas, of non-plant community specific, or alien plants, or plant community-specific plants that naturally occur in very small numbers in a few spots, etc.) or cattle grazing will increase erosion. Fogel found that 40-85% of a plant community's energy is in underground structures, including mycorrhiza. The fallacy is after a fire there are no roots on the site. I believe as little of the mycorrhizal grid and root grid on a site is disturbed by a fire. The mycorrhiza is still intact holding together if you treat it right! Seeding grass or other weeds can shut this down(decouple the grid) by greedily extracting all the nutrients on the site before the mycorrhizal plants can re-establish and feed the fungus with carbon(food). (This is food chain blocking.) The mycorrhizal community collapses, the microfauna eat the fungus, their community collapses and the system becomes bacterial as the bacteria eat the dead microfauna. The fungi feed the fauna at the bottom of the food chain. As the bottom of the food chain collapses little native vegetation is left, mud slides in winter, fires each summer as the weeds and grasses take over. The pioneer wildflowers capture the nutrition of the site for the fungal grid to recharge, then the shrubs and trees to follow.
No succession can occur without the wildflowers first. (Curtis noticed the same thing. Perry and Choquette raised the possibility that mycorrhizal associations facilitates this succession(or lack of).) What has been happening in many areas is a cycle of fire, seeding junk, fire, and all weeds. Each time the cycle gets shorter. The "micro- and macrofauna in the upper 50 mm of the mineral soil in unburned areas is ...11 times as dense as in [regularly] burned sites.....Fire-induced reduction in the porosity of these soils was attributed to this faunal impoverishment."(Daubenmire)
The other reason (This one I laugh at when I hear it, what ignorance!) is because 'all the seeds burnt up (or off) during the fire'. Our natives have been through hundreds if not thousands of wildfires, if the seeds were going to 'burn up' they would not be there! Where do people get these ideas? This is simply not true. Many burnt sites that have the fired bricked soil with no signs of organic debris. No bumps, no stumps, no twigs, no seeds visible, nothing! These are the sites that have the best growth of secondary colonizing Ceanothus seedlings and pioneer Lotus(Deerweed). Dry soil is a good insulator, fires can reach 400-670 deg. F(200-350 C.) but the temperature 1-5 cm (1-2 inches) down remains normal. Daubenmire reported grass fire temperatures of 720 degrees C., ( hot enough to melt Aluminum, Lead, Magnesium, Tin and Zinc,) at a depth of 2 cm. (one inch) the temperature was elevated only 14 deg. C.. That means if the soil temperature was 75 degrees F.(23 C.) when the fire started it was raised to 100 deg. F.(37 deg C.), which might be no more than a soil site with no plant cover. In dry soils "spores and infected roots present below the lethal point should provide an ample source of inoculum for young seedlings." (Pendleton and Smith) If the soils are wet, everything changes, as in winter with prescribed burns, 95% of the soil bacteria and a greater amount of soil fungi are killed.
On our site that was 'seeded with grass' the native pioneers survived in only the most mycorrhizal (harshest) spots. In the transition communities there was little survival of germinating native species. We also get one of the star thistles from the cheap seed.
Fires are natural. They happen on their own every 100-250+years. Intervals less than 60+ years do not allow the long-cycle plants to build up a seed pool. Annual grasses decrease this interval, sometimes to months.
What is so intriguing is Hoover(Flora of SLO Co.) repeatedly pointed all this out in the 1960's. Where has all the misinformation come from?
About Lolium: A quote from Robert F. Hoover (Vascular Plants of San Luis Obispo County, 1970),
"L. perenne. Perennial Rye-Grass. Commonly included in seed mixtures for low-quality or temporary lawns and often persisting or escaping, especially in places which are at least temporarily moist. This is probably also the species which is extensively sown, under the erroneous name of "rye" after forest and brush fires. This practice cannot be too strongly condemned, because seeds of native plants are abundantly present to grow under favorable conditions after fires, and those desirable native species are too easily crowded-out by the worthless Lolium."
This is from the article most quoted for seeding (I kid you not, it is commonly the ONLY article quoted to justify seeding.)
"Such reseeding is done with four principal objectives:(1) to provide forage for game and livestock, (2) to provide a plant cover to lessen soil erosion, (3) to furnish competition to reduce survival of brush seedlings, and (4) to supply fuel for a reburn to further reduce the brush cover if necessary."
In 1994 the was the Hwy. 41 fire. We attempted to stop the seeding after the fire. The governmental agencies involved(Calif. Division of Forestry, U.S. Forest Service, etc.) Gave a public hearing where they announced they were 'only' going to seed with the 'Native' Cucamonga Brome(Bromus carinatus) 15,000 acres of pristine chaparral trying to 'avoid' the areas of rare and endangered plants. (They were going to seed 75,000 acres before we starting mailing letters to the media and politicians. Senator Feinstein deserves credit for helping.) When they seeded they used helicopters, the pattern became obvious as the following pictures show. The green is the unseeded area the straw colored areas are dead grass.
A study a mile away from the site, done in 1989 found "the number of shrub seedlings in the ryegrass-seeded flats of burn soil were much lower than those in the unseeded flats. Heights of native seedlings in the ryegrass-seeded flats were also less than in the control flats... Seeding of ryegrass was not effective in reducing erosion in ten of the eleven study sites of this experiment; in fact, average sediment yield was greater in seeded plots." Charles Lane Curtus, 1989. Moreover Patric in 1974 found that grass seeded sites had much greater erosion than sites vegetated with native species. Sites seeded paralleled bare soil sites in runoff and erosion.
"Seeding has a low probability of reducing the first season erosion because most of the benefits of the seeded grass occurs after the initial damaging runoff events."Robichaud, Peter R., Jan L. Beyers and Daniel G. Neary
A
season after the wildfire. This site was
NOT seeded.
California plants and leaf burn times
Wildfire and California Native Plants, design, native landscaping
