Life Kit - Make A Wildfire Plan Before You Smell Smoke

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Wildfires are raging in California and the Pacific Northwest. Here's how to prepare for a wildfire and what to do if one is approaching.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Stephanie O'Neill, a regular NPR contributor who's covered major wildfires in the American West for nearly 20 years. This episode, how to stay safe in wildfire country. Living in or visiting California and the West means knowing how to prepare your home, how to safely evacuate, and what to do if you get trapped. With a blanket of smoke hanging over the West Coast, it's more important than ever to make sure you're wildfire ready. Fire expert Porfirio Chavarria specializes in the intersection of wildlands and communities at the Santa Fe Fire Department in New Mexico. Preparation, he says, starts with asking yourself some important questions

well before you smell smoke. What's my situation individually? And what are the best decisions that I can make for my family and my livelihood? Chavarria is going to explain how to think about your evacuation plan, how to prep your home, and how to to make a wildfire action plan with your family. What does that mean? What does that entail? A wildfire action plan is just getting ready for wildfires in general and making a plan for protecting your property, protecting your home, and thinking about

all the scenarios that would happen before, during, and after a wildfire. And you want to start thinking about, you know, what are we going to take? What are those emergency supplies that we're going to need? Creating a kit. Then you want to think about where are you going to go? In evacuations, we're not always in the same place. I'm not always home. I'm not always all together with my family. Where do you want to meet in case you don't have your communication devices? So you want to come up with a common area that you can all meet that you know you're going to go in case you get evacuated. And then how do you plan to get out? What are those routes that you know of? Lots of folks ask me, well, what's our evacuation route?

Well, I'm like, well, you know your community much better than any first responder is going to ever know your community. And you know those roads and you know which ways are passable and not passable. And it's about kind of playing that what if game and thinking, OK, if if this street was blocked off, what's my alternative? What's another way that I can get out of here? So let's talk about emergency kits. What should go in those? So you're going to want water, you're going to want food, some kind of first aid kit, a flashlight, a radio, and you want some personal sanitation supplies, any kind of medications that you're going to need. If you have pets with you, you're going to want all the stuff that your pets need. And anything that you're going to need

outside your home away from all the things you're used to for, I'd say, 36 to 72 hours. One thing that's really challenging to do when you're racing and you're feeling perhaps anxious about trying to get out safely is to grab the things that you really want. So what I hear over and over again is, why did I take this silly thing when I should have taken my family photos? What kind of advice do you have for people about creating a go bag? And the way I think about it is create your kit and put all the stuff that can go in a go bag like maybe a flashlight a radio maybe you can store some water in there maybe some some non-perishable food that you want to take with you things that you're not going to use every day or don't have in a section that you want every day but then along with that go bag put in a checklist of

all the things you want to take for sure with you when you get evacuated. That way you can open that go bag, take a look at that list and grab those things and you won't forget them. Because I think that's part of it is that we want to put everything in there that we possibly want to take in a go bag, but it's not practical to store them in there. When it comes to property, fire experts say it takes a combination of defensible space around your house and property and the hardening of your home to give your house the best chance to survive a wildfire. So I wanted to start with fire hardening your home. Tell us what that looks like. So hardening your home is really trying to make it safe from those embers and resistant to those flames right next to your

house. So typically you want to look at what your structure is made out of. If you have shake shingle roofs or any kind of shake shingles, those are really flammable when embers land on them and you may want to consider changing those things out. You want to look at your roof and really decide see if how fire resistant your roof is. Those sound like really expensive things, but there's also some really easy things that are really inexpensive to do. Every year, take a look up on your roof, make sure there's no needles or other debris that could start from an ember on top of your roof. You want to clean your gutters and get all the debris out of those every year at the beginning of fire season. You want to look around your windows and any other vulnerable place around your property where if embers landed on it and started something around your house on fire,

it would start the rest of your house on fire. So that's fire hardening. Now the second part of the equation is to create and maintain defensible space. Essentially it's a fire buffer around your home to impede the flames and to stop the flying embers from catching things on fire. So how do we do that? Certainly. So we create these zones around your house. The first zone is five feet around your house. So you want that five foot area around your house to not have anything flammable in it. That five foot buffer includes no vegetation, old boxes, firewood, anything that can start on fire right around your house you don't want in that five foot zone. So the next zone is the five to

thirty foot zone and really in that zone you're trying to break up the continuity of the vegetation that's in that zone. So if you do have flames coming through that zone, they're not able to travel from vegetation to vegetation leading all the way up to your house. Think of fire as a series of ignitions because that's really what it is. It's just starting a new ignition every time it touches something that can start on fire. So as those flames come through, you want to break up the vegetation, break up anything that is flammable so that if a tree starts on fire, it's not going to start the next tree on fire. In that five to 30 foot zone, you want to have fire resistant plants, things that aren't as susceptible to wildfire.

Another thing you want to do in that five to 30 foot zone is you want to bring up the canopies. And what I mean by that is those lower limbs on your large trees, you want to lift those up, I'd say about a third of the height of the tree. And really think of the way fire is burning. It's really traveling by burning the small things. It's burning things that are about the size of your pinky, maybe as big as the size of your wrist. That's really helping to spread fire. Certainly those larger big limbs, maybe that are the size of your thigh or larger, those certainly burn, but they don't really actively promote fire spreading. They're more about increasing the intensity and the residual heat that stays is when those bigger things are burning.

So we want to get rid of the kindling, so to speak, around the house, the dead stuff, the pine needles, if you have pine trees, that kind of thing. Yeah, definitely. And you want to be wary about mulch. You don't want to put mulch right next to your house or other things that where that residual heat's going to stay and it's going to burn. Any of that small diameter woody material is going to start much easier on fire than something larger. The next zone, you know, 30 to 100 or 200 feet, depending if you have that space, right? Not everybody has that ability to do that.

But in that zone, really, you're trying to just continue that breakup of continuity of vegetation. But you can be a little lighter on the land. You don't have to break it up as much as you would, say, in that 5 to 30-foot zone. And let's say the fire now has started, and it is coming your way, and you're feeling like you may have to prepare to evacuate. What other things can we do to prepare our home if we think we might have to leave it during a wildfire? I think one thing you want to leave is your lights on, especially a porch light so that firefighters can see your house. And in most cases, you're going to be evacuated and that fire is going to last a couple days and firefighters are going to be there during the day and during the night so that they know

that there's something there. You also want to just take a look in your house, make sure all the windows are closed and anything else that needs to be closed where any place where an ember could enter your house and start something on fire, you want to make sure those types of things are closed. So we talked about your property and home. What about preparing your car? Especially if you live in a wildfire prone area, you want to keep that regular maintenance on your vehicle, knowing that you have good tires and that you have a full tank of gas and that your car is mechanically able to leave in a situation that you need it to. So let's say you're trying to get out and there's

a few different scenarios. One is you're in your car and you're in gridlock and the fire is bearing down. What can you do when you're trapped in your car to maximize your safety? Well, I like to just remind people that when you're in your car, you're away from the heat and the smoke and the flames. You know, you're always safer inside away from the flames than you are outside exposed to everything that a fire is going to bring. So if you're stuck in gridlock, I would suggest you stay in your vehicle as long as you possibly can as a fire moves over your area. Typically, that main flame front passes over about 90 seconds it takes to pass through an area. And so being prepared to wait out that 90 seconds. If you can have it on and have the air conditioner on recirculation

so that you kind of pressurize that cabin in your car from the smoke and the heat coming in. Certainly have all the vents closed and everything. You may want to think about getting on the floorboard or away from the, you know, that heat that's going to come through the windows. If you have maybe blankets or other materials that you can kind of use to insulate your, the, you know, put up against the windows to insulate yourself from that heat that's going to come through. You don't want to put anything wet around your face. You want everything dry to be around your face,

dry bandana or some other face mask or covering. When you have something wet like that, in that much heat, it starts to create steam and that steam will essentially cook your lungs from the inside. Wow. Okay. And what happens if you're in your home and you really can't leave your home? How do you make yourself as safe as you can be in your home during a wildfire? Well, hopefully before you even consider staying in your home, you've done some work, right? You've prepared your property.

You feel pretty good that you've done the home hardening, the defensible space work around your property. Now you're stuck in your house. You want to move some of that furniture to the center. You want to maybe even bring in some garden hoses from outside your home so that maybe you can use them later after this big flaming front passes. One thing you might think about doing is just like any emergency, you want to maybe fill up the bathtub and the sinks with water because that water might go out later. Is there anything else that I didn't touch on that you wanted to touch on? You know, recovery is really hard.

And you've experienced a traumatic event. Going back after an evacuation, I think, is really hard, even if you haven't lost your home. Your neighborhood's going to look different. The people you know and you loved are all going to be impacted. Finding resources locally that can help you through that event is going to be really useful to you. Porfirio, thank you very, very much for talking with us about this important topic.

Thank you for having me. So a quick recap. If you're living in or visiting wildfire country, here's what you'll want to remember. Start by making a wildfire action plan for your family. Pack emergency kits with food and water and other basics for you, your family, and your pets. And prepare a go bag for your valuables and keepsakes. Harden your home whenever possible, replacing flammable wood materials with fire resistant ones, and then create a fire buffer around your house. The goal here is to clear away flammable vegetation to slow or stop a wildfire on your property before it reaches the house. And last

but not least, know what to do if you get trapped on foot in your car or in your house. There are ways to stay safe. For more episodes of Life Kit, go to npr.org slash life kit. We have episodes on all sorts of topics, from how to invest to how to prepare for hurricane season. If you love life kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. Also, we want to hear your tips. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us at lifekit at npr.org. This episode was produced by

Claire Marie Schneider, Megan Cain is the managing producer, and Beth Donovan is our senior editor. I'm Stephanie O'Neill. Thanks for listening. On Facebook, there are these three brothers who love guns, say guns are overregulated, say the NRA is too quick to compromise. And they're gaining more followers every day.

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