Vegetation management — On April 19, the board of directors of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (Ag + Open Space) approved an additional $3.8 million in funding for vegetat
The Northern Sonoma County Fire District completed a prescribed burn near the 600 block of West Dry Creek Road yesterday evening and smoke will continue to be visible, possibly for the next few days, as vegetation continues to burn within the control lines.
Property owners and the fire district will continue to monitor and patrol the controlled burn as needed.
The Northern Sonoma County Fire District worked with CalFire, the Cloverdale Fire Protection District, the Dry Creek Rancheria Fire Department, the Northern Sonoma County Air Pollution Control District, property owners, and Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Fire Forward to conduct two prescribed burns over the Thanksgiving weekend on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29.
The Nov. 27 burn took place on 177 acres of grass east of U.S. Highway 101 and the Russian River between Geyserville and Cloverdale.
Sunday’s burn took place across 12 acres on the east side of Bradford Mountain near West Dry Creek Road.
Mark Gradek, a volunteer with the Geyserville Fire District/Northern Sonoma County Fire District, explained a little bit about the Dry Creek prescribed burn in a Facebook Live video posted to the fire district’s Facebook page yesterday night.
“We’re doing some firing in the timber here and what we’re trying to do is try and minimize the damage to the canopy and we’re going along and scraping a ring around the base of these trees down to the bare minimum of soil and lighting fire up the hillside so it slowly backs away from the trees,” Gradek said. “A lot of these fir trees tend to have a lot of sap on them so they tend to catch fire and there also tends to be a greater accumulation of fuel on the uphill side.”
With his camera Gradek showed the crews firing areas with torches and walked around to show the fire’s progress eating away at old and tangled brush along the hillside.
“We’re starting to lay fire down on the ground going horizontally here,” he said, referencing the crews who were managing the control burn on a grassy and lush uphill slope. “We have the slope to our advantage and an uphill wind which is helping things burn along here.”
A similar approach was used for the Geyserville prescribed burn.
“This is an area that burned in the 2017 Pocket Fire and the purpose of this burn — the landowners maintained the roads and fire roads and we’re using those roads — is to ignite fire and burn the understory out reducing the vegetation to reduce the fuel load of future fires,” said Geyserville Fire Chief Marshall Turbeville.
Turbeville said in a Facebook video that this, and other types of land management, is something the district wants to do more of in the future.
“This is something the fire district is looking to do more of in the future as well as chipping and other fuel reduction activities,” Turbeville said.
According to a Northern Sonoma County Fire District press release, prescribed burns serve two main purposes, to reduce the amount of surface vegetation in order to reduce the intensity of future wildfires and to return wildlife to the ecosystem as a natural disturbance regime.
“Animals that live in California’s landscapes coevolved with regular fires in their native habitat. Many of these animals even depend on fire to maintain their habitat. During a burn, research has shown that ground burrowing animals typically survive fires by staying in their burrows until the fire has passed,” according to the Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Fire Forward website.
The Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Fire Forward program was created to help build ecosystem resilience by teaming up with private landowners and public agencies for fire fuel reduction and controlled burns, by hosting talks and workshops on home hardening and land management, by offering wildland firefighting type 2 training to build a local team of prescribed fire participants and by working closely with CalFire and other partners.
