Built to Burn - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 218

Several grand experiments have attempted to install truly massive arrays of fuelbreaks;
interestingly, all have been in California. The Ponderosa Way was a 650-mile-long fuel-
break that spanned the entire west slope of the Sierra Nevada. Built with the bottomless
labor of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), is sought to segregate permanently the
lower-elevation chaparral from the higher-level conifers, a Maginot Line of fire protec-
tion (and a weird counterpoint to the New Deal's Shelterbelt tree-planting scheme on the
Plains). When the CCC camps left, the Way went with them. Later, several experiments in
“conflagration control” designed broader fuelbreaks, along ridgelines, both in the dense-
conifered Sierras and the chaparral-clothed mountains of Southern California. The conifer
model involved selective thinning (not scalping). These proved expensive, however, and
failed during the extreme events that they were intended to staunch. After the 1970 fires,
a network of fuelbreaks was constructed along the mountains of the Los Angeles Basin,
swinging from ridge to ridge like a Great Wall. While they have their value for access, the
control of minor fires, and firefighter safety, they cannot alone halt a major fire. They still
have to work with suppression forces, and an all-out conflagration will fling sparks across
the barrier as readily as over rock outcrops. 9
What the intermix scene demands is a much broader scope for defensible space, though
it not be to the same standards as adjacent to a house. What the scene needs, considered
on a landscape scale, is not a fuelbreak but a fire greenbelt. It needs something on the scale
of a golf course, not a moat. The width and character of such a greenbelt will depend on
the properties of large fires in that setting, but probably anything less than a mile will
prove doubtful, and a mile and a half is a more reasonable scale. The purpose is to break
the momentum of a crown fire and the saltation of spotting, the process by which wind-
blown sparks rekindle new fires well in advance of the nominal front. The scheme is less
a seawall than a series of speed bumps. No one enters a residential neighborhood from an
interstate freeway—no one brakes from 75 to 25 mph—within 200 ft. The exit occurs in a
graduated series of slowing speeds. So it should be with fire greenbelts. 10
The intensity of the landscaping will increase as it approaches the village. There is no
reason to nuke the woods: the purpose is not to stop fire cold, by paving a surrounding
lagoon of asphalt, but to force the flames out of the canopy and onto ground and then, by
offering only lightly textured combustibles, to tame the fire into something controllable.
There will be fire; there will be a need for firefighters; there may well be some houses lost,
the outcome of poor housekeeping or bad luck. But firefighters could stand against such
flames, and the community will enjoy a reasonable degree of protection.
Or they could if there were enough of them. If anything has become crystal clear over the
past decade it is that professional firefighters cannot do the job adequately. They are too few
in numbers and too scattered to mass together at critical points during the fire eruptions.
It will always be impossible to have enough, along with engines and apparatus, to muster
during the first outbreaks or on extended tours. The only force that can protect homes is,
finally, homeowners. The Community Fireguard programs devised in Australia show how
to prepare a local populace to stay and defend, or if they choose to leave (as many should),
when and how to do so. The current American practice—mass evacuations, partial pro-
tection of structures, maximum risk to firefighters—is too idiotic to continue indefinitely.
But for any fire protection to work, the structure must be defensible, and the surrounding
landscape in a form that will allow a fire militia to hold against an approaching firefront.*
The greenbelts could well become recreational sites, wildland parks, suitable for picnics
and nature walks; they could be regularly maintained by burning, at least in some locales;
* http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/residents/programs/cfg.htm (accessed July 15, 2009).