Prescribed Burn Association Forms in Round Valley to Promote Fire Preparedness

The recent rains that soaked Mendocino County have got us all thinking about the change of seasons. The wet weather to come gives us an opportunity to prepare for the following year's fire season. I sat down with Laurance Hall, one of the coordinators for the newly formed Round Valley prescribed burn Association to learn about their efforts to promote fire preparedness in Round Valley. What can you tell me about the Round Valley prescribed burn Association. We formed because there was
A grant through the county with Cal Fire funds that Mendocino Fire Safe Council is administering Round Valley needs awareness of, are you prepared for fire? Is your place defensible, and that the way to get that awareness and education to happen was to light things on fire. There's nothing better than a burn at your neighbor's property to make you think about, did I rake the leaves, clean my gutters is my
I cut is, you know, and when we're doing it in fall and winter when it's really not gonna spread.
It's the time to be thinking about and getting ready for those. One of the cool things about prescribed burns in California is they have done hundreds and hundreds of birds. They've never had an escape and haven't had injuries. They're really a safe way to do it because it's doing it low and slow and within the right weather conditions.
So you formed in spring of 2024. Is that correct?
Yes.
How many residents of Round Valley
Do you have currently participating in the program?
We have almost 30 properties.
And it's not all right in the valley. Some of them are quite a bit out into the hills. We're actually at the point that we're looking at the potential to burn this fall, and we're going like we might get to half of those properties. This burn season, so fall winter. Another one that we're really excited for, we're going to burn off the airports and around the airport. It used to be burnt as a training burn with cover of fire, which is really how it will be again, but the prescribed burn association is just make sure that
All the processes get dealt with through the county for permissions, because that's always an area that we look at that there's fires there, but also if we were to have major wildfire again, that is an area where if it is burned off and maintained, people could drive and park safely with lots of space there to do that. So that's kind of one of those we've looked at it. If we had something like the August fire and people having
evacuate, you know, and I know then there was talk of like, well, what happens if it hits the valley? What happens if, you know, we can't really get out. Where could we go and having somewhere like that that then once we burn it this coming spring, the idea with that is it will bur, it will be burned as a training burn every spring. So then that will always be an area that is able to be used if we needed it in a disaster.
For people who have never seen a prescribed burn or done anything with fire, what is the process of deciding what to burn and how to do that. So it's a long involved process and we usually do at least a couple of site visits which were in the middle of doing now. So usually the first site visit is we come out, we talk about it, we talk about why they want to burn, what areas they think could be burned, and then we kind of look at a very general
Is it ready, you know, what would it take to be ready and then we talk about what kind of work would need to be done. And then we work on putting in the burn plan prior to anything happening, we'll go through, we'll do either a Calfire or a Colo fire burn permit as well as an air quality burn permit. Once all of those pieces are done, then the landowner signs off on the burn plan.
What agencies in Round Valley or what group helped form the Brown Valley prescribed burn Association. Was it the Mac?
Was it just an informal group of citizens. Really the ideas came out of some meetings with Klo Fire Protection District, Cal Fire, US Forest Service, and Medocino County Fire Safe Council. Some prescribe burn associations do get nonprofit status or other.
stuff we have chosen not to, which means that we will always have somebody else as a fiscal sponsor managing grants or anything like that for us. The idea is that we really just stay in an informal organization that is land owner or volunteer based, I mean, at this point, we're pretty much landowners because the idea is that come out and burn on one person's land and they go help us on somebody else's.
But obviously there's people that want to come out and burn and may not have land, which is to our advantage too. There's a couple of us coordinating in our burn boss, Terry Warlick, I'm sure as we get closer to burning, we'll have more formal stuff because we'll have to have safety planning procedures and stuff like that and coordinating, but otherwise we're just running our Facebook page, which is Round Valley Prescribed Burn Association, and then running an email list. And so if folks who are listening want to get involved.
Would you share that email address in case they don't have Facebook?
Yeah, so they can email me Laurancey Hall at gmail. L O U R A N C E H A L L or they can call me 707-972-3637. And then like I said, the Facebook is Round Valley Prescribed Burn Association, and we haven't got any more organized than that.