Upper Mark West Fire Safe Council

In response to public demand for information on fire and building community resilience in the wake of the 2017 Wine Country wildfires, we co-produced a three-day Living with Fire in California’s Coast Ranges Symposium in May 2018.

The symposium included 22 presentations by CAL FIRE officials and national experts on fire ecology, meteorology, fire resilient building techniques, fire safe community strategies, and other topics.

It also featured a day of field trips, including to areas impacted by the Tubbs Fire and Nuns Fire. More than 400 people attended and participated in a public dialogue about the relationship between humans and fire in our region.

These expert presentations, and a selection of live videos produced by KRCB Northern California Public Media, are now available online. A proceedings document with presentation highlights and photos from the symposium and field trips are also now available. Here are some examples:

- Intro to fire ecology by Dr. Scott Stephens of UC Berkeley's Stephens Lab for fire science

- Creating defensible space by Ben Nicholls, CAL FIRE's pre-fire division chief for Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties

- Home design and retrofitting techniques for wildfire defense by Yana Valachovic, of UC Cooperative Extension

- Meteorology and weather associated with extreme wildfire, by Dr. Craig Clements of San Jose State University

Access these presentations and more at https://www.pepperwoodpreserve.org/livingwithfire

We hope you'll find these resources helpful in furthering your understanding of wildfire and what agencies, communities, and citizens can do moving forward to enhance community resilience to fire. There is no single solution to solving this complex challenge—but by creating dialogue we can learn from the 2017 fires and work towards a safer future.