I am grateful that Becky Clark [Idyllwild Town Crier editor] has given me a monthly column devoted to the many issues that affect fire safety in our community. As Board President of the Mountain Communities Fire Safe Council, I will generally represent its views, but any errors in fact, logic, or style will be attributable only to me.

This is both a good and an awful time to start this column: good in the sense that fire is very much in our awareness, awful in that five of our firefighters were just killed. Let me deal with the last part first. The town is coming together in a terrific way to help the families of the fallen, but the shock of their deaths will last a long time. I don't think we will ever forget. Nor should we.

Fires always have unpredictable elements, especially involving turbulent weather, so fighting them will always be dangerous. We may at some future time figure out how to mechanize the process, but until we do people will continue to have to put themselves at risk. As trained and skilled as firefighters are, they must always confront some amount of uncertainty.

We can't always know how weather will change the fire equation, but some things we know quite well. Eliminate fuel and you have no fire. Mitigate fuel and you make the fire less intense.

Many people have honored the fallen firefighters in different and inspiring ways. I would like to suggest another: fire abatement and fuel reduction. I hope one way we honor them is to think about their brothers and sisters on future fires, and I hope we do all we can to keep them safe. The one thing we have control over is the fuel around our homes, and when we lessen that fuel, they are safer.

Public Resources Code 4291 is called the 100 Foot Defensible Space Law because it gives firefighters a safer platform from which to fight the fire. When people abate their properties to code they create this defensible space.

Abating to code is fairly simple. Rake out all dead leaves and needles 30 feet from your home (or any structure with a roof on your property.) The vegetation in the 30 foot zone should be well pruned and watered, with nothing dead. In the 30-100 foot zone remove surface litter deeper than 3 inches, and prune the trees up to 6 feet, more on slopes. The key to all of this is spacing—don't allow walls of shrubs or trees anywhere within 100 feet. If you can't walk through it, it's probably not safe. When you think of spacing consider vertical as well as horizontal space. You want to break up possible fire paths to and away from your home. See our website at mcfsc.org for more information.

(Fuel reduction in the forest is not something any one of us control, but it is something that we can support through state and federal funding. I will write more about this later.)

I realize that if every property on the mountain were abated, there would still be risk. But the risk would be less. If we evacuate in the face of an approaching fire, some will stay behind to fight it. We can honor those people by making their jobs a little safer.

Mike Esnard, MCFSC President