Members of the Conservancy’s board of directors spent much of the past summer working with UC Berkeley Forestry Professor Emeritus Joe McBride developing a plan to manage vegetation in Strawberry and Claremont canyons. I am pleased to report that Joe’s plan is now available at www.claremontcanyon.org/fuel-management-proposal.
We urge UC to follow the plan as it is the standard for how to minimize the damage of a future wildfire. In 2018, UC received a $3.6 million wildfire prevention grant from CalFire, an Initial Study can be found here. We humbly and sincerely offer Professor McBride’s plan. It is budgeted and ready to go.
The McBride plan is important because, as board member Jerry Kent points out, the current vegetation situation in the hills is identical to what existed prior to the 1991 wildfire that cost 25 lives and 3,082 homes.
The plan is a detailed prescription for what to do to reduce flammable invasive plants, replace them with safer vegetation, make escape routes safer in an emergency, and includes a set-aside of 170 acres for the rare and endangered Alameda Whipsnake.
We owe Professor McBride our deepest thanks for his contribution. His plan will serve, not only to guide the University about what it should do with its CalFire grant and its own resources, but as a model for other communities in the wildland-urban interface.
Undoubtedly, some will say the plan goes too far. We say that its prescriptions are necessary to reduce the risk of what a future wildfire will do. Our lives and our homes are of primary importance. We also say that removal of eucalyptus and pine trees will not leave the ground barren and unsightly. The land will recover. Just drive up Claremont Avenue to Signpost
29, park, walk through the gate to the redwood bench, and look around. The eucalyptus trees there were removed and native bays, willows and coyote brush have grown up to replace them. The vista is both beautiful and more firesafe.
The McBride plan includes tree and brush removal on strategic ridgetops needed to stage firefighting equipment and stop a wildfire from moving canyon to canyon. EBMUD and the Park District already maintain some ridgetops this way, including this one in Claremont Canyon near the top of Panoramic Way (left).
