Fire Safe County Roads Program Goal: Develop emergency escape routes from our Mountain Community to enable our residents and guests to move out of the danger zones when disasters strike. Disasters included are wildfires, earthquakes and major storm damage. This multi-year program requires extensive cooperation between our Mountain Community Landowners and several key County and State agencies.
Welcome to the initial edition of the Summit Road-Highland Way Corridor - FireSafe County Roads Project Report. This report is being published and distributed by our community volunteer-based Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance. This 5.5 critical road corridor along the Summit Ridge is Project #1 of the multi-year program.
We want to thank the landowners who filled out and returned the postcards the Alliance mailed in late June to the landowners along the corridor. Our team has gathered from public records all available essential information from the landowners whose property has frontage with Summit Road-Highland Way Corridor.
For this project to be successful we need three things from each landowner or their proxy.
1. Email addresses to establish an inexpensive and flexible communication connection. In public records there are 137 landowners with property frontage along these roads in the corridor. Public records do not contain most email addresses. Currently we have gathered 83 email address from landowners who returned the post cards or who receive the Mountain Alliance newsletter. Our current critical goal is to obtain the additional 54 emails addresses. To get this done, we need you and your neighbors' help by sending us an email with landowners' names & email addresses. Due to the current pandemic we cannot do face-to-face contact.
2. Your engagement with your neighbors and our experienced Foresters to the design needs for a Fire Safe County Road Corridor. The creation of the Fire Safe County Road Corridor will involve significant removal of flammable material from along the frontage of these roads to be a successful fire safe route. Achieving this as a design goal for the entire corridor involves highly technical fuel issues and personal choices. We expect these discussions to be needed for many of the frontage areas. The current conditions of these frontage areas vary over a huge range, from elegant suburban treatment to no clearing over the last 50 years. Again, with the current pandemic we cannot do face-to-face contact. We are planning the heavy use of emails, online reports (like this report) and access to relevant web sites. For interactive sessions we will use Zoom teleconferencing. This landowner engagement is the key goal of this phase of the project. The current schedule calls for this phase of the project to be completed by October 1st, 2020. At that time the grant application will be completed and ready to be filed. The grant will define the scope of work to be performed and the funding required.
3. As an essential part of the grant, we will need landowners to be informed sufficiently about the scope of work along the corridor so that they will support the plan. Our grant application will be more compelling if we can get close to 100% landowner support. The grant review process and approval along with an environmental review, completing the scope of work plan, getting bids as well as winter weather will take us into late winter 2021. That gives us about 5 months to work out all the details. Before work can begin, the landowners will need to sign a permission slip for the work they have agreed to be performed on their property.
Why we need this FSCR program and its complexity:
The beginning of this project in the summer of 2019 was a growing awareness of the fire risks brought on by longterm neglect of our forests and woodlands, and the clearly changing climate which made the fire danger both more likely and deadly. Members of our local churches and other community organizations came together to address the risks that wildfires in Northern California in the last several years have made so clear.
We sorted through a wide range of possible fire projects. We found there to be programs for private and neighborhood home hardening and defensible space development. These groups provide organized programs that apply well to private homes, property and roads and will continue to be employed.
The members decided to focus on the public road system in our counties to complement these key privately funded programs. We found that a real and very scary issue was escaping from a wildfire using established county roads. During severe wildfires, escape was often not possible and led to serious damage and death. This disaster happened during the Camp Fire in Paradise up north.
In a wildfire, emergency escape routes have heavy traffic, caused by emergency vehicles fighting the fire and property owners trying to escape the fire. We cannot allow these key escape routes to be closed by the wind driven wildfire crossing the roads. Flammable material along these key roads must be cleared now and in the future, to keep these essential emergency escape routes open during developing emergency situations. Ensuring emergency escape routes requires a high level of cooperation between the Mountain Community and County and State governments.
Our Community has about 60 miles of county roads. It became clear that we needed to start with the key corridors. The choices were easy. Using house counts and access road data, the Summit Road-Highland Way Corridor was clearly priority one. The Soquel-San Jose Road Corridor from the Summit to Soquel was clearly priority two.
To create these emergency escape routes, we must have cooperation amongst the landowners along the priority corridors. The County right of way to maintain these roads is generally 20 feet on either side of the roadbed. The setback distance of the fuel removal along these roads is a key consideration in creating emergency escape routes. The distance from the road edge necessary for a proper shaded fuel break could be 40 to 100 feet or more in some extreme cases, onto the landowner’s private land. Their involvement is essential in the design of the fuel break.
As a demonstration of an approach to some of our fuel clearance techniques, a demonstration shaded fuel break project was created on the south side of Summit Road last Spring along the Loma Prieta School frontage. An excellent three minute video is available of this successful project here.
The current FSCR team:
With the essential assistance of Supervisor John Leopold, we identified and engaged County and State resources needed to make the Fire Safe County Roads project a reality. Starting in September of 2019, we began to refine and focus the program.
By the end of January 2020, the FSCR Project Agency members and their contribution to the program are:
- Supervisor John Leopold’s Office: Overall organizing and gathering the team.
- Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance: The SCMA has taken on the task of working with the landowner community to inform them of minimum requirements, listen to their ideas and needs. Then integrating all this and working with our technical team partners who will create a plan that accomplishes the technical goals for emergency escape route exits along the 5.5 mile corridor.
- San Mateo/Santa Cruz CAL FIRE: They bring valuable experience and will author the scope of the project and work with the Alliance and when needed, landowners. They are the field team that creates and submits the environmental permit, and assists in the grant writing. They will be involved as the work contracts are accepted and fieldwork is performed.
- Santa Cruz County Resource Conservation District: RCD will write the grant request and obtain the funding. They will administer the hiring of and supervision of the field crews.
- Santa Clara County Fire Safe Council: Assist as needed. Forty-two percent of the affected parcels on the Corridor are in Santa Clara County. They have experience from this last season’s completed and successful Highway 17 Shaded Fuel Break project.
A preview of Progress Report #2 upcoming late August:
- The Alliance is proposing creating ten contiguous landowner neighborhoods teams along Summit Road-Highland Way Corridor. There are simply too many landowners with too many question and ideas to share. Our hope is that in each team leadership will step forward and help with the work.
- We will supply each team with the following;
- A detailed expandable map of their neighborhood displaying APS, addresses, etc.
- A list of each landowner with name, mail address, phone and email when available.
- Info on a project specific Web page with growing info in the form of FAQ’s, etc. concerning techniques to create shaded fuel breaks along this corridor.
- A resource to schedule a team zoom meeting to aid in development discussions and how to share between neighborhood teams.
- An Alliance member to contact with questions.
- Assistance if necessary for each team to set up an email contact list to make email between neighbors simple.
Working together we can get this done!
