Regional wildfire risk is increasing. Climate change is contributing to stronger weather events. This coming winter we will face challenges of a super-strong El Niño that is now predicted to bring torrential downpours. Most people in our community are learning about these challenges, and want to take action to protect their families and their homes.
Meanwhile the members of West Contra Costa Fire Safe Council are improving our effectiveness to help our communities of West Contra Costa. To fulfill our ambitions, we are seeking volunteers to help, both in big and little (one-time!) ways.
Ready to join us? Email wccfiresafe@gmail.com. Tell us how you would like to help.
We redesigned our website, and have a new lead, Daniel-Charles (DC) Ogar, to help direct us in the right direction. This time we are working with a good structure for content development—but we really need help to get this content onto the website.
We have some video ready for the YouTube channel. And we need a team to feed our WCCFSC Facebook page and NextDoor posts. We have talked about starting a Substack with its multiple modes—where several fire researchers and wildfire professionals are going. Not enough bodies!
One of our former so-talented members developed a fantastic teaching program for our popular Evacuation Preparedness workshop—and people have asked us to do more of these. Sadly she has moved from the area. We could really use an experienced teacher to conduct this workshop. The aplomb of an experienced teacher is such a skill!
We are now qualified for services of Google for Nonprofits, but their offerings and processes are, frankly, a bit opaque. Could really use a guide, at least for a few months.
We have a Preparedness lead. We have CERT trainers. We want to do workshops and trainings. These are team efforts.
We are about to start a fundraiser (see our Ambitions listed here—need money to get things done!). People, you know who you are. You like people, you know the money will go to helping your community, and you want to help.
We want to support a volunteer Home Advisor program, with well-trained volunteers who, at your request, will come to your home, assess, help you decide what is most important to get done, identify the low-cost fixes, and provide resources for you to get the work done. This is still early days, but local fire agencies want the support, With the new Zone 0 and Defensible Space rules, many homeowners will need to make big changes in the next five years. Plus people are losing their insurance, or are required to take action to retain it. (Or they want to lower their insurance bills.) Others know they need to do the work to protect both their and their neighbors’ homes safer in the face of an ember storm. We have a number of people who are already well-trained in firescaping, but not so many who are well-trained in home hardening. And multilingual advisors are particularly needed. Would you be interested in joining this future team?
We have this wonderful quarter-acre site for our Firewise Garden at Richmond Fire Station #63 (Valley View and Amend). We are dealing with some, ahem, special challenges (how about the calculated 9,000 gallons of water in a 24-hour period during an El Niño downpour washing across the site?), but we’re also installing a clean Zone 0 around the fire station, and hope to include art. Strong arms to move and distribute rock (some of us carry only a third of a bucket at a time, but many carriers will speed up the job). Creative souls for the art. Oh—then there’s the care and feeding of roughly 120 plants, waiting to go into the ground—they’re just waiting for the deer-proof propagation pen to be set up to move on-site. Hmm…a couple of handy put-it-together types helping with that task would be appreciated too. And of course we have already set up some succulent beds that would love some care. You’ll learn a lot on the ground!
We are nice people too! You will make friends (as the volunteers of the WCCFSC already can attest). We are passionate about our communities and our local wildlands—why so many of us live in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). Join us. Email wccfiresafe@gmail.com.
