Walking the pups today on Haystack Drive, near the Iron Mountain Trailhead, I noticed some fresh piles of tree cuttings alongside the road.
Looking closer, I noticed they’d just been cut from the ponderosa trees that crowd the right-of-way.
“The FACA Team has been here,” I thought.
Well, I was partly correct. Henry Hudson coordinated it with his group, the Community Mitigation Volunteers–this week including Ted Sammond and David Koster. Turns out FACA–Fire Adapted Community Alliance–isn’t up and running completely yet.
This is work that was identified in a recent project coordinated by area fire departments called the Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Bureacracies move slowly, so Henry and his team are moving ahead on their own initiative, tackling roads all around our mountain community.
The goal is to make our major roads clear for access of emergency equipment, and open for our exit in the event of evacuation. We have vivid memories of recent fire events, and being prepared is what we do.
Henry and his team want to have a good load of slash to burn when the Air Curtain Burner they’ve been working on gets here in April. We’ll have more on that big event as the date approaches.
Walking our neighborhoods it’d be easy to assume that work like this is being done by the work crews of our community association. Not so. This is a project done by your friends and your neighbors, volunteering their time and their sweat to keep us all safe.
Henry and David live in Filing 9, Ted in Filing 1. This project is in Filing 6, a long way from their own neighborhoods.
Want to help with the Community Mitigation Volunteers? You’d be welcomed.