Cal fire cards will add 1 million acres to the fire zones of fire fire

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection will start to deploy a long -awaited update of its gravity areas of fire risks on Monday, which is adjusted more than double the number of acres in local fire jurisdictions which must comply to the stricter codes of fire safety buildings.

Previously, the State has mapped and applied fire safety regulations only to local areas with the highest possible, deemed “very high” fire dangers. But in 2021, the state legislature Fire of Or ordered To extend cartography to include “high” danger zones so that the Legislative Assembly can also apply the regulations for the construction of fire safety to new “high” areas.

The new cards should extend the approximately 800,000 acres currently in the jurisdictions of local zoned fires as “very high” of 247,000 additional acres. Some 1.16 million acres will be classified into “high” areas, according to a press release from the Governor’s office.

Cal Fire will also publish new “moderate” danger zones, its lowest risk classification which is rarely referenced in fire safety regulations, but has not indicated how many acres it would include.

The agency has not released cards for these local areas – on the land of the city and the county where local fire services, and not CAL fires, have been responsible for responding to fires – since 2011.

Cal Fire had initially planned to release the cards in January, but Los Angeles fire storms interrupted the deployment. CAL fire managers said that many agency cartography staff, including scientists, supported fire -fighting and recovery efforts and that they did not want to hunt the communities already confronted with The intimidating task of reconstruction.

However, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed a decree on fire safety on Thursday which, in part, ordered Cal Fire to release the cards, the agency forced.

The agency will start deployment by publishing cards on Monday for the interior of Northern California. Cal Fire will then publish cards for the northern coast of California on February 24, the central coast and the central valley on March 10 and Southern California – including the counties of the, San Bernardino and San Diego – on 24 March.

Once released, the new cards will go to hundreds of cities and counties across the state. They will have four months to adopt the cards and start applying increased fire safety regulations. Local jurisdictions can choose to increase the danger area or notes – but cannot decrease them.

The severity areas are referenced in at least 50 elements of legislation, codes, subsidies and other rules and state documents.

Many regulations apply only to new constructions and significant repairs or renovations: they include the building codes of chapter 7a which require owners of properties in “very high” and now “high” areas to take durable measures, Especially by using materials resistant to ignition, cover vents that could allow embers to enter the houses and cause interior ignition and install multi -channel or fire -resistant windows.

In 2021, the State adopted a law obliging local courts to consider the risk of fire for the planning of the use of community land, not only individual structures, in “very high” danger areas. For example, governments must now take into account the evacuation routes and advanced stress on water supply that could occur during disasters, and they must locate essential public facilities such as hospitals and command centers emergency outside the high risk zones of fire “when they are possible”.

Cal Fire creates cards for forest regions where it is responsible for responding to fires and for more developed areas of the State where local fire services are responsible for fire management. The agency published new cards for areas managed by the State in September 2023; However, he has not published cards for areas managed by local for more than a decade.

Cal Fire told defenders of fire safety that he now planned to update the cards approximately every five years.

Liberation comes shortly after Cal fire recognized weaknesses In its model approach, which led to the zoning of the agency only 21% of the properties of Altadena in the perimeter of the fire Eaton as a risk of “very high” fire, according to a Times analysis.

Cal Fire said that new cards would largely leave these untreated weaknesses, since new scientific approaches to solve the problem remain too underdeveloped and experimental.

However, the agency has brought light adjustments to its model which led to an increase in zoned acres as “very high”, including the use of a more detailed climate and data in extreme weather.

It is a story in development.