Fire Safety

I focused last week on fire safety through two events: a two day seminar entitled “Protecting Your City from Wildfire” and the yearly goal setting meeting for Los Altos Hills.

The seminar was informative, particularly for someone who isn’t a fire expert. The following sessions stood out: Aligning Insurance Providers and Community-wide Home Hardening Efforts; WUI Issues: State and Local Perspectives; Wildfire Prevention Engineering. This was an opportunity to understand what the issues are so I can better work with the experts.

Unsurprisingly, addressing fire safety was identified as an important goal for the town in the coming year, maybe the most important. During the public comment period Jim Waschura encouraged the council to come up with an actionable plan with details. He’s right! It’s great to set a goal but now we have to execute.

We must address fire safety through multiple actions:

• town-wide education

• aligning existing ordinances and practices to support fire safety

• support fire hardening activities

• encourage neighborhood participation

• and others….

I’m proposing to set up a Fire Task Force at the next council meeting. I hope to include members of committees, town staff, LAHCFD staff and community. It may be a bit large as a group but we need lots of voices to contribute and get the word out. We also need collaboration, a plan and a schedule to do a good job.

I come from the corporate world and I see this as an opportunity to develop a valuable product. In this case the product is educated and informed residents, and a fire hardened landscape. It will take time to deliver this outcome but we need to start the process as quickly as possible.

As always, I would love to hear your opinion. Also, please pass this along to other residents so they can share their ideas. They can sign up for my email (delivered approximately bi-weekly) here.

Thanks!