Cal Fire lists 35 top sites at risk — Fuel reduction is agency’s goal for Bay Area, state

Gov. Gavin Newsom should immediately allow the thinning of vegetation on almost 94,000 acres of state land in a bid to keep more than 200 communities safe, California fire officials said Tuesday as they released a list of the state’s 35 most critical fuel-reduction projects.

The priority projects include areas near Orinda, Aptos, Woodside and Los Gatos. To narrow the list, state experts not only assessed fire risk but such factors as whether residents of areas were older or more disabled on average, and whether their communities featured good escape routes in case of emergency.

The 28-page report by the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, recommended a variety of other steps California should take to reduce risk after two catastrophic years of damage, in which wildfires killed nearly 150 people, destroyed thousands of homes and raised fundamental questions about the safety of hundreds of towns amid a warming climate.

Newsom and other officials are under intense pressure to respond to the growing crisis, and many experts have questioned whether state and federal authorities are doing enough. While the state manages wildlands throughout California, the federal government oversees the majority of areas prone to fire.

“This report’s recommendations on priority fuel reduction projects and administrative, regulatory, and policy changes can protect our most vulnerable communities in the short term and place California on a trajectory away from increasingly destructive fires and toward a more a moderate and manageable fire regime,” Cal Fire concluded.

Just two days into his term, Newsom signed an executive order requesting the Cal Fire report on how the state should respond to its wildfire disasters. He also proposed $305 million in new fire funding as part of his first budget.

The new governor asked for solutions that took into account vulnerable populations in high-risk fire areas, as many of the hardest hit residents in recent fires — particularly November’s Camp Fire in Butte County — have been the elderly and disabled.

The second-highest-ranked fuel-reduction project was 467 acres near Woodside, along Kings Mountain Road. Cal Fire officials said thinning there could protect more than 271,000 people in 18 vulnerable communities. Ninth on the list was the 1,760-acre North Orinda Fuel Break, which the state said had the potential to protect about 561,000 people in 30 communities.

The list also included projects in or near Aptos, Santa Cruz, El Granada and Big Sur.

Work on those projects has already begun. It includes removing dead trees; digging out fuel breaks that can keep fires from spreading into populated areas; clearing defensible spaces around homes and businesses; and improving routes for people to flee a community and firefighters to access it.

Amy Head, a Cal Fire spokeswoman, said her agency has always created a priority list, but this year is different.

“We’re upping the pace and scale,” she said. “We’ll have more equipment and personnel with more funding.”

In its report, Cal Fire recommended suspending some regulatory requirements, such as permitting and licensing, to streamline the effort. The plan also called for the National Guard to assist in creating bases near the fuel-reduction projects, and for state help in finding housing for seasonal fire crew members.

Earlier this year, Cal Fire, for the first time, hired six fire crews — three in Northern California and three in Southern California — that focus on thinning vegetation year-round. In the past, inmate crews and firefighters did the work when they weren’t fighting fires.

Cal Fire budgeted for four more of the crews in next year’s spending plan as well.

“California needs an all-of-the-above approach,” said Cal Fire Director Thom Porter.

The report stressed a new fire reality in California. Fire season has stretched 75 days longer in the Sierra, and climate change is a “force-multiplier” creating drier summers. Battling wildfires has saved lives and property, the report concluded, but it has also “disrupted natural fire cycles and added to the problem.”

The state faces a “massive backlog of forest management work,” Cal Fire said. The agency stressed that funding would be needed to maintain the work over time.

Over the next year, Cal Fire said, governments should create new, stricter standards for housing in fire-prone areas. The private sector, officials said, should be incentivized to incorporate fuel reduction into logging on private lands. And the agency said air-quality restrictions should not stand in the way of prescribed burns that clear vegetation.

Experts said Cal Fire faces a daunting challenge to turn around the crisis. As much as 15 million acres of California forests are in poor health because of drought, insect infestation or shoddy forest management and need restoration work to boost fire resiliency, according to state estimates.

Cal Fire oversees less than a third of this troubled area, with the federal government managing most of the balance. In the fiscal year that ended in June, Cal Fire reduced fuels on less than 40,000 acres.

LeRoy Westerling, a climate scientist who studies wildfire at UC Merced, noted that one of the reasons Cal Fire can’t do more is that most of the land the agency manages is privately owned, meaning it only has so much say.

“It’s not like the (U.S.) Forest Service or the Park Service where they can go and do fuel management,” Westerling said. “It’s a much bigger challenge to build relationships and work across communities. And not every landowner has the training, the resources or the will to manage their land.”

Some wildfire experts criticized Cal Fire’s recommendations for not going far enough and, in some cases, advocating practices that offer little or no relief.

Chad Hanson, an ecologist who researches fire recovery with the John Muir Project, said areas near the coast, like Sonoma and Napa counties as well as much of Southern California, would not benefit because the guidance focuses on higher-elevation, forested lands.

“The most vulnerable communities in California are not in forests. They are in grasslands and shrublands,” he said. “This plan explicitly excludes those.”

Hanson also questioned the state’s call for more logging and thinning, referencing a growing body of research that shows certain logging projects can sometimes cause forests to burn hotter and faster because they clear away larger, more fire resistant trees and leave younger, vulnerable ones.

Cal Fire’s recommendations to fortify homes with fire-repelling building materials and create more defensible space around them, he said, were more effective strategies.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Kurtis Alexander contributed to this report.

Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mgafni