Marin Wildfire and member agencies provide wildfire risk evaluations of properties to help residents achieve effective defensible space and home hardening. These evaluations support applicable fire and building codes, and offer resources for understanding defensible space and home hardening concepts.
As of July 1st, 2023, all member agencies perform Defensible Space and Home Hardening Evaluations using Fire Aside, a software platform that allows residents to review their evaluation and find resources to limit their wildfire risk. For more detail on the Wildfire Risk Evaluation Program, please visit https://www.marinwildfire.org/dspace
The following Strategic Measures track key indicators towards the creation of defensible space and home hardening, and the associated reduced risk and flame length. The data displayed on this page reflects year to date progress in 2024, and is refreshed at least once a day. For 2023 Strategic Measures for Goal 5, please visit https://www.marinwildfire.org/goal-5-strategic-measures-2023.
Each Marin Wildfire zone sets its own target number of private parcels to evaluate for risk associated with defensible space and home hardening annually, and Marin Wildfire tracks progress towards these zone-specific targets. This provides agencies with flexibility regarding their evaluation roll-out strategy. Note that not all parcels receive a Wildfire Risk Evaluation. For example, business-owned parcels are evaluated through agencies’ own business inspection programs.
Residents who access their report are 5 times more likely to resolve at least one issue (based on re-inspection data) so it is very important that residents access their report after evaluation.
Measure 5c tracks mitigation progress across three categories of issues outlined in the resident's Wildfire Risk Report:
• Defensible Space Violations
• Defensible Space Recommendations
• Home Hardening Vulnerability
Marin Wildfire believes that to make meaningful progress towards fire adaption, residents need to mitigate at least 50% of their Defensible Space Violations, 30% of their Defensible Space Recommendations, and 10% of their Home Hardening Vulnerabilities. The charts below track progress against these benchmarks, and illustrate the share of mitigation that is taking place with incentive (grant or other support, including direct abatement or any other assistance provided to the resident).
As an example, if there are 20,000 defensible space violations found, and 2,000 are mitigated, the Year-To-Date Defensible Space violations resolved will be 20% (2,000 / (20,000*50%)).
This Measure will utilize the risk scores developed by Willow Labs, and take into account the individual hazards make-up of each zone. Marin Wildfire will track the level to which the zone is addressing its hazard profile by looking at hazard mitigation compared to overall hazard score. This Measure will be tracked for:
• Defensible space
• Home Hardening
To track this measure, Marin Wildfire is working with Willow Labs, a geospatial analytics firm. More information will be provided soon.
Measure 5e will also utilize the analysis prepared by Willow Labs. Each combustible issue found on a parcel is associated with a measure of flame length, as this characteristic is part of the intensity component of the risk model (the amount of radiant heat produced by each combustible issue and received by nearby structures).
The following example provides context about this measure:
Flame length is among the most easily identifiable measures of fire behavior used in fire suppression. It is an important factor when determining strategies available to firefighters during an incident. For example, direct attack methods, such as directly treating burning fuels with a hose is more feasible with lower flame lengths while taller flame lengths require indirect attack methods such as creating control lines some distance away from the fire’s active edge. Vegetation projects help reduce flame lengths, which protects neighborhoods and roads, facilitates fire suppression, limits damages and eases evacuation. Flame length of 4’ of less, particularly within 0-30’ of structures, keeps the fire low to the ground and prevents or limits fire spread to structures or nearby vegetation. It increases the chances that a structure might withstand a fire event without suppression efforts.
This Measure also requires more development and will be updated soon.
