Bracing for the heat: Santa Rosa announces wildfire season has begun
The Brief
The Santa Rosa Fire Department on Monday announced the start of the city's wildfire season.
The department will begin conducting weed abatement inspections to ensure properties are defensible against wildfires.
SANTA ROSA, Calif. - On the heels of a 20-acre grass fire that threatened an RV encampment, the Santa Rosa Fire Department on Monday announced the official start of fire season in the region.
In an effort to prevent more destructive fires in the months to come, the department will, in the next two weeks, begin conducting weed abatement inspections at properties throughout the city.
Paul Lowenthal, the SRFD Fire Marshal, said he hopes announcing the start of fire season will help residents better prepare themselves and their homes.
"We've seen really significant compliance, especially what's here locally. When you look at the Tubbs, Nuns, Glass and Kincade fires that either burned through the city or directly impacted the city and threatened the city, people have changed their behaviors," Paul Lowenthal, Fire Marshal with the Santa Rosa Fire Department, told KTVU. "We've seen an increase with compliance with weed abatement, compliance with defensible space and compliance with overall vegetation management, ultimately making our community safer."
The department's weed abatement inspections are part of the city's vegetation management program, which requires property owners to maintain fire-defensible space around a structure.
The ordinance requires grass to be cut to four inches or less, as well as the removal of dead plants, grass and weeds, maintaining trees so that no portion is closer than 10 feet from the chimney opening of a neighboring property, and removing the branches of trees up to 10 feet from the ground.
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Santa Rosa has experienced or been threatened by several notable wildfires in recent years, including the Tubbs Fire, the fourth-most destructive blaze in California's history. That fire, which burned in October 2017, destroyed over 36,000 acres in Napa and Sonoma Counties.
The Bay Area's wildfire season, as stated by the Western Fire Chief's Association, an organization made of the leadership of firefighting organizations across the western United States, starts in June and can run through November.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change has caused the national window for wildfire season to peak earlier in the year. Between 2003 and 2021, fire season peaked in July, whereas between 1984 and 2002, most wildfires occurred in August.
The impact of climate change on wildfires is becoming more and more evident. Two of the most destructive blazes in California's history swept through Southern California in January of this year, well outside the window of the region's wildfire season, May through October.
The research organization World Weather Attribution, which studies the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, found that human-caused global warming made the conditions that drove those fires 35% more likely.
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