Marin County fire officials say the devastation caused by the Lahaina fires in Hawaii that killed more than 100 people this month serves as yet another warning of the risk Marin faces.
“I’m very cautious to say this is a new reality because it’s not new anymore,” Marin County fire Chief Jason Weber said. “We’ve seen what happened in Santa Rosa and Paradise and now Lahaina. This is what we need to be prepared for.”
While the cause of the disaster that destroyed most of the seaside community of Lahaina on Aug. 8 is under investigation, local fire officials said there are similarities and differences to the threats Marin communities face with wind-driven fires.
At the same time, they said Marin has already learned the hard lessons from previous destructive blazes in California, including the 2017 Santa Rosa fires and the 2018 fire in Paradise that killed 85 people.
The result has been millions of dollars of investment in work to harden communities abutting wildlands, safeguard evacuation routes, reduce fire fuels, improve alert systems and reinforce fire response crews.
“We have been so much closer to the significant impacts, so wildfire is on our residents’ minds,” said Mark Brown, executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, an agency created by Marin voters in 2020 to head fire prevention work throughout the county.
Lahaina’s fire was fueled by strong winds and non-native grasses abutting the community that had been dried by an ongoing drought, a situation similar to conditions in Marin, Brown said.
Lahaina also has limited evacuation routes similar to some Marin communities, such as those near Mount Tamalpais, where residents have only one way in and out. In Lahaina, these limited evacuation routes were attributed in part to the fire’s high death toll of 115 people as of Friday. Another 388 people are still missing, according to an announcement from Maui County on Friday.
Maui County filed a civil lawsuit against Hawaiian Electric Co. this week alleging the utility caused the fires by not de-energizing downed power lines. Downed power lines have caused several fires in California in recent years.
But Brown said there are also key differences between Marin and Lahaina. Lahaina has much gentler slopes compared to Marin, which allowed winds to carry the fire down toward the community and ignite buildings. The fire behavior would not be the same on Marin’s steeper terrain, with offshore wind speeds being much less intense the closer you get to lower elevations along the coast, he said.
Brown said virtually no defensible space was created between the wildland and the homes in Lahaina, which caused buildings to ignite when the flames reached them and resulted in embers that spread throughout the community. The homes in Lahaina were also designed to have more airflow in the tropical climate, which allowed the fire to spread more rapidly, Brown said.
Since its creation in 2020, the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority has prioritized fire prevention work starting in communities and working outward toward more rural areas.
“The prioritization is really around homes and evacuation routes because we know that is what’s going to kill people and destroy homes,” Weber said.
The authority conducts about 30,000 home inspections annually to identify fire risks and offers matching grants for vegetation removal projects.
Some of the larger projects being conducted by the authority are shaded fuel breaks meant to create a buffer around communities to slow fires down and allow crews to reach them before they reach homes.
About 15 miles of a planned 38-mile shaded fuel break in the Ross Valley have been completed, with another 15 miles expected to be completed by the end of June 2024, Brown said. Work began this year on a planned 50-mile fuel break surrounding Novato, which is slated for completion in five years. Other smaller fuel breaks are planned throughout the county as well, Brown said.
Clearing vegetation on evacuation routes is another priority, especially in communities that have only one way in and out, Brown said. A $1 million state grant awarded last year will allow fire officials to clear fire fuels along nearly 2 miles of Highway 1 through Tamalpais Valley into Mill Valley over the next four years. The authority is also finalizing an analysis of the county’s evacuation routes to identify risks and identify projects to address them.
“There are so many road miles in Marin. We’ve made a dent,” Brown said. “We haven’t obviously done all of it.”
The University of California is conducting a three-year study to model five areas of Marin — Fairfax, Inverness, Mount Tamalpais, Novato and San Rafael — that are seen as having some of the highest risks for evacuations. The study will use simulated wildfires to determine how they affect communications, buildings, traffic flow, emergency service responses and community reactions.
But fire officials stressed that successful evacuations will require residents to play a part, including evacuating early, checking in on neighbors and having every seat in their cars filled while evacuating, to prevent traffic jams.
“Our roads are not designed to accommodate mass traffic like a wildfire is going to generate,” Todd Lando, the Central Marin Fire Department hazard mitigation specialist, said during a discussion hosted by Fire Safe Marin on Monday.
Fire prevention work is also underway in Marin’s vast protected open space, including national parks, state parks and the Mount Tamalpais watershed.
Mount Tamalpais has not had a major fire in about 80 years, leaving behind decades of built-up trees and brush. The Marin Municipal Water District, which manages 20,000 acres of the Mount Tamalpais watershed, is in its final year of a $13.5 million, five-year wildfire prevention plan to clear vegetation in the watershed, especially near critical water facilities. The district is treating about 1,500 acres per year under the plan to thin and clear fire fuels such as invasive broom and trees killed by sudden oak death disease.
Shaun Horne, the district watershed resources manager, said this vegetation work is set to continue past the end of this year and includes prescribed burns. The work will also be informed by a new report released this month by the interagency collaborative known as One Tam that assessed conditions of 118,000 acres of forests and woodlands in Marin County. The report identified $20 million in proposed forestry treatment projects throughout national parks, state parks and the district’s land.
Ensuring residents are alerted to fires is another priority area for local emergency response and fire officials. Survivors of the Lahaina fire have stated they had little to no warning of the approaching blaze after Maui County officials failed to activate fire sirens. They also reported power and cellular outages.
In Marin, emergency planners have a variety of notification systems, including geographically targeted alerts, sirens, emergency broadcasts, social media and the county’s emergency notification system known as Alert Marin.
Only about 65% of residents are signed up for Alert Marin, according to Steven Torrence, director of the Marin County Office of Emergency Management.
Torrence said his office still has the ability to send notifications of evacuation warnings and orders by email, phone and text to residents regardless of whether they have signed up for the system. These alerts can be targeted to specific geographic areas, even down to a house-by-house level.
However, he said those who do not sign up for AlertMarin will not receive notifications on other information such as shelter locations and resource centers.
Torrence said some of the difficulties in reaching the remaining 35% of the population include distrust of providing personal information to a government agency as well as technological literacy issues among some residents.
Torrence said this has led to some changes in the department, including removing the requirement for residents to submit their email addresses to sign up for Alert Marin.
“We are actively working specifically to figure out what is the most culturally appropriate way to get this information to our underserved communities on the intent of what their information is going to be used for and also making sure how the system actually works,” Torrence said.
Residents who do not have internet access can call the Office of Emergency Management at 415-573-6584 to have a staff member sign them up for notifications, Torrence said.
While work is underway to back up cellular and communications towers in the event of power outages, Brown said another option for residents, especially in areas with poor cellular coverage, is to purchase a NOAA weather radio that includes backup battery power.
Lando said residents must also have situational awareness, especially on “red flag” fire weather warning days, about strong winds, the smell of smoke and weather conditions.
“Those signs all occurred in advance of the fires in the North Bay, the fires in northern California over the last decade and frankly the fire in Maui,” Lando said during the discussion on Monday. “There were signs and residents who caught wind of that and recognized those signs and reacted early were the ones who were most likely to get out safely.”
More information on Marin County emergency notification systems can be found online at emergency.marincounty.org/pages/alerts.
