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The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CDF) formed the California Fire Safe Council with the intent of seeing that local fire safe councils were formed with the single charge of educating the local public about fire abatement practices that can save their homes in the event of a fire. The Mountain Communities Fire Safe Council (MCFSC) was formed in 2001 and quickly saw that while the single CDF charge was certainly necessary, it did not go far enough. The communities of the San Jacinto Mountains are mostly surrounded by National Forest -- a forest that has been under-managed for more than a hundred years. While that under-management was based on a misunderstanding of the role fire plays in nature and in the maintenance of habitat, it nonetheless has created havoc within both the agencies deemed responsible for the forest and for the forest itself and it's wild inhabitants. Many people who now live in the mountain forests came here as flatlanders thinking that all these trees were really neat. We slowly came to understand we had chosen to live in a keg of dynamite. The forty-trees-per-acre (thirty-three feet apart on average) forest no longer exists in North America with rare exceptions in Mexico. We realized that we were surrounded by two hundred to three thousand trees per acre. It was with this shared knowledge that the MCFSC took a new direction. We began to push for thinning both in the forest and inside the community. We formed a group we came to call the "Woodies." This group consists of sometimes as many as twenty-five people with their own chain-saws, trailers, log-splitters, and tractors. The Woodies began to remove trees on private property for individuals, donating the resultant firewood to a local agency for those less fortunate. When the massive die-off of both conifers and manzanita began, we started talking seriously with the USDA Forest Service about thinning in the forest. As a result of that effort, the MCFSC now has a partnership contract with the Forest Service, and we have performed a major role in the creation of what is now known as the Pine Cove Fuel Break. That is, we worked two days a week at what we do best, and that is the thinning of (mostly) dead trees and brush to create a park-like area from three hundred to five hundred feet wide around the perimeter of the community of Pine Cove in one of the areas most sensitive to a fire coming up a canyon. That effort is now mostly completed, and the MCFSC has now received $500,000.00 for the abatement and thinning of three areas of the communities that are adjacent to the National Forest over the next eighteen months or so. Much of that money will go to ground. That is it will be spent not on administrative expenses, but in letting contracts to accomplish the goals. In order to determine that we get our money's worth, we have developed an evaluation process and attendant forms to evaluate a private property -- either developed or not -- to determine what needs to be accomplished, the best way to do that, what to look out for, and perhaps most important, what costs we can expect from a contractor. This last bit of information will directly affect the contracts let to arborists, etc. When completed, the process and forms will be made available free of charge to fire safe councils everywhere with instructions not only for their use, but for modification of pricing structures for local contractors. The secret to our success thus far is the willingness, no, the eagerness with which our people dig into the resolution of problems within the community. While working on the fuel break, it is not uncommon for more than one-thousand hours of volunteer time each month to be expended by mostly retired guys and gals.
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