FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Leigh Ann Gessner
650-691-1200, lgessner@openspace.org
Midpen Open Space Ramps-Up Fire Readiness
Expanded Wildland Fire Resiliency Program Celebrates 5 Years
Los Altos, CA — Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (Midpen) staff just completed their annual wildland fire training. Midpen rangers and other personnel refreshed critical skills to ensure they are certified and prepared to act as first responders when needed.
The training, held at Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, combined a classroom learning session with field exercises, including:
- Mobile Attacks: Suppressing fire using water pumpers installed on ranger patrol vehicles. (Live fire is not used in the training)
- Progressive Hose Lays: Rapidly extending water lines across open terrain.
- Fuel Break/Handline: Removing vegetation to halt fire progress.
- Fire Shelter Deployment: Practicing emergency survival protocols.
Although fires rarely originate within the open space preserves, Midpen staff can sometimes be first on-scene to fires such as roadside ignitions until local fire agencies arrive and take the lead on the incident.
To support these efforts, Midpen patrol trucks are outfitted with water pumpers and firefighting tools during fire season. Midpen also owns water trucks capable of delivering thousands of gallons to remote incidents where hydrants are not available.
Midpen staff work throughout the year to reduce wildland fire severity and risk in our region, in-part by managing vegetation with a focus on ecological health and wildland fire resilience.
Midpen’s Wildland Fire Resiliency Program, now in its fifth year, has allowed the public agency to proactively expand upon existing environmentally sensitive vegetation management in Midpen preserves to promote healthy, resilient, fire-adapted ecosystems; reduce wildland fire risk; and facilitate efficient response by fire agencies. Since the program’s inception, Midpen has been able treat an additional 1,044 acres and reintroduce pile-burning and prescribed burning to its land-management toolbox.
In order to do this work at a landscape level, Midpen has needed to build-up the necessary resources and capacity through receiving grant funding to leverage public funds, hiring additional staff and contractors and working with new and existing collaborative partners.
"Fire is a fact of life in California and native plant communities in the Santa Cruz Mountain region have evolved over millennia with fire,” Midpen Senior Resource Management Specialist Coty Sifuentes-Winter said. “A changing climate, a long history of intense logging resulting in dense regrowth, coupled with fire suppression, and the fact that people cause the majority of fires in California all contribute to a longer, more intense fire season. Midpen’s Wildland Fire Resiliency program is aimed at helping Midpen meet these new challenges."
Learn more about Midpen’s Wildland Fire Resiliency Program at openspace.org/fire.