We have Conrad Jackson with us again, talking about safety for wildland fire, and learned a lot last time, and want to know how we can now rest at ease for our property, preparing our property from fire. So my gutters, I've noticed a lot of full gutters, and people don't think about fire. So how does the fire travel? So

when, when we have a wildland fire, your your Joe, average, like regular wildland fire, not not the LA urban conflagration, but like, you're just, we have a wild land fire here, like you experienced with the do see fire and stuff like that? Or people have been around here for a while the Indian fire, we have a lot of ember fallout. So embers are what destroy 80% of the homes that get destroyed in a wildland fire. And so there's a really big misconception from folks that and I see it all the time here in Prescott, like, well, I don't live next to the forest. What do I have to worry about? Or I saw somebody on social media this week say, Well, I live in downtown Prescott. What do I have to worry about? Well, Amber's a ferry for a mile, two miles easy. I mean, we saw that with the legato fire back on Easter, right? I mean, there were people having large pieces of debris landing two miles away. You know, luckily, it was wet that night, so all the embers kind of died out as they're flying. But in a summer wild land or a dry scenario, like we had a wild land fire today, it's so so dry, those embers are going to still be very active when they land a mile, two miles away. So downtown Prescott's just as much at risk as the person who lives in in the edge of cathedral pines or something like that. I

saw they had films, obviously, in social media in California, where a palm tree, they even run a fireman, yeah, because then we've got on it and let the whole thing up exactly.

And we have a lot of the number of people who use some kind of cedar or Cypress, you know, hedge and stuff like that. I mean, those things are catcher's nets, if you think about it. And you know this well as a landscaper, especially the the cypresses that people like to use for the hedges, and you can't clean out underneath them, so over the the years and the decades, all that old detritus builds up in there. So we need, how do we mitigate that stuff? How do we how do we best prepare our home to withstand that Ember storm? Because we're not, we're not talking a couple embers. I mean, you've seen the footage this week. We're talking what if, what if 10,000 cigarette butts landed on your back deck today? Yeah, you think one of those might do something so, so let's be prepared for that. And so like, when I do an assessment for for a house, and then the fire department offers free assessments. I will come out and yes, yeah, people just sign up. They can just go to Prescott fire.org and they go, I want a defensible space inspection, and I will come to their house, and we'll do that, and I'll work with those homeowners to kind of figure it all out. When I do that, when I do that assessment, I basically start at the house and work my way out. And I look at how hard, how hardened is that home? That's the trend. We use a home hardening like, how durable is it against Amber fallout. I start looking at the roof. So is it? Is it a Class A asphalt shingle. Is it a ceramic roof? Is it is a metal roof? Those are all higher caliber, higher caliber protections. We actually still have houses in this community wood shaped shingles. Yeah, yeah, in yakash, but like a super thick neighborhood yakash, but has folks that have Shake Shingle moves, nothing and Yeah, and so that puts in the terrifying thing is about, is it puts a risk to the entire neighborhood, because Amber land on that roof, like that house on fire. Now it's the first house fire in the in potentiating more fire spread. So that's one cool thing about like, what we're talking about is, if I improve my home, not only does it improve my ability for my homes defense against wild empire, yeah, but I'm also protecting your home as your neighbor, so it's less likely to start on my property and go into your Property and things like that. So doing defensible space work is one of those really cool things that it not only improves my survivability, but it helps my neighbor. And there's not a whole lot of natural disasters, like if I put sandbags up around my house for a hurricane, that doesn't help you, that only helps me. So going back to the house, how hard? How hard is that home? What's the siding look like? It's stucco sightings, way better than than wood siding I have. I have a house that was built in the 80s, so it has wood siding. So I have to be very mindful that is as it ages and starts peeling away that I nail it back in place. I i caulk stuff there's so there's not little gaps for embers to be able to go in. Yeah. A lot of stuff that was built back in the 80s. The vents for like the for the attic vents, they have metal screens behind those louvers. And back then, a lot of that metal screening was quarter inch screen. Well, the science shows us that a quarter inch gap embers will go right into that attic. Gosh, it's been two years ago. There was a fire over in Laguna, and all the houses burned up from attic fires. It was a 200 acre fire. It did like a half a billion dollars, yeah, say $500 million in damages, because they're all, you know, it's Laguna houses, so they're all $5 million homes, I tore out a whole neighborhood just where all the embers were going into all those attics. So now, because city of Prescott adopted a wildland urban interface building code, all of our new construction has 1/8 inch mesh, and 1/8 inch mesh is way, way better at protecting from Ember flow into an attic. So that's, again, that's a home hardening aspect. So when I'm done my inspections, I look and say, Oh, hey, you've got quarter inch. You should either you do it or hire a handyman or whatever, and get in there and put that better screening in there. So we look for stuff like that. We look for components that are plastic that would get melted through skylights. A lot of skylights aren't like a double pane glass. A lot of them are plastic. That's a risk. Embers land on that melt through, and now your home is open. It's like an open window, and now Ambers are landing inside your house. So that's a problem. But we look at that house, we look at what kind of doors, what kind of just, what gaps, how, how tightly sealed is your home from letting embers land in different places, the rain gutters. It's all well and fine to have metal rain gutters, which most of most of us do. But have you cleaned them lately? Are they full of are they full of pine needle litter, oak leaf litter, Juniper Fallout, those are the most common things, and the gutter covers are relatively inexpensive to have put in. I mean, in the grand scope of things, so I would highly encourage, and that's actually one of the things we inspect for, is what, whether or not you have metal gutters, and do those metal gutters, if you have overhanging or tall trees, do they have some kind of gutter cover on it? Because it's a good thing. I know

I was on a campfire, just a barbecue, little fireplace hanging out, and we had some wood, a little bit of ember flew out right in playing, if you started to see it smoke. I like, how is that even possible? So you can see the Simba go. It was just a little bit of area that we raked up and it was just sitting there. Wouldn't done very much, but it's just how fast you don't like you go down 17. You have to inspire some change, right? That's just a how fast that happened.

You went. You know, when I was on the Prescott hot shots back in the early 90s, we had a night where we chased 30 plus fires on the Beeline highway, somebody dragging a chain from Phoenix, yeah, 30 of them all night long. So, you know, some of them were small. They were, you know, just a couple, you know, a couple yards. But there were other ones that were dozens of acres. And for a long night, one

little spark can do. And then, like we talked about underneath plants, you know, we go new fire wise, things to clean out underneath. And they show, like, look under here, you'll see pack rats, like, if you just had one spark that that's just engulfed so quick. And, you know, to keep that clean. Yeah, so, so

let's talk about what you keep clean. So the science shows us that if your house, it has a five foot gap from whatever that burning source is, like the radiant heat hitting it, it's in really good shape. It really, really helps. So you want nothing combustible from the edge of your house out five feet. Now, what does that mean? That means no plants, no no hedges, no rose bushes, no lilacs. What? No vegetation. But it also means the other stuff that we inadvertently put there. I mean, the plants were often intentionally putting there for, you know, landscaping, but stacking up lumber underneath the deck because it keeps it out of the weather, or especially this time of year, a lot of folks still have wood stoves and fireplaces, and so they have they don't want to go all the way out to the shed to get more wood, so they Put this big pile of wood next to the house, next to the back door, wherever, which, if we had two foot snow on ground, probably wouldn't be any big deal. But we don't had any moisture in two months. So you have, you have something that can burn, that has lots of minutes. And this is intended to burn, and it's sitting right up into your house. So we see tons of that, and then kind of going back to your leaf litter thing. If you look around your house, you have, like the inside corners, like the nooks inside your house. If you start looking, you'll see that's kind of where the leaf litter builds up. Oh, yeah. So it shouldn't be a big jump in logic to know that any place around the edge of your home where you're seeing accumulation of leaf litter, pine needle litter, stuff like that, it got there is because where the wind blows, so you have that little Eddy, that little corner, and it spools up, and that's where that leaf Well, now, if we have a wildland fire today and the wind's blowing, where are the eddies around your home? The eddies around your home are, oh my gosh, it's going to take that Ember and put it right in the exact wrong spot if you didn't clean out the leaflet. So

back to our earlier podcast. You talked about the information and getting this message. So tying to that probably be smart. Before you leave to walk around your house, and he garbage can you got moving away. You move it away. Welcome leaves, like you said, before you,

before you Boogie, before you Boogie out of there. And I mean really, as a proactive homeowner, you really should be doing that on a regular basis, and it and especially right now, because it finally got cold enough, and we've had a couple good wind events that even those trees that were still holding on to some, you know, lingering leaf have all come off, yeah. And so everybody's yards have a certain level of decay and detritus all over the place. And so getting in there with that blower and blowing it out is a great idea. So that first five feet super critical, and then we have some failure points that do destroy homes, because a lot of homes were built with wooden decks. Nowadays, we do see a lot more tracks which can still burn. It has wooden, you know, support system, but it's a little more resistive. But those wooden decks are really, really vulnerable. And so if you get, like I said 10,000 embers land on that deck, and it's wood, it's going to burn. It's going to burn right up to your house. And that's a problem. We see a wooden fences with wooden gates. Yeah, it is super dry and and people really don't think about that. And so one of the things like, well, Conrad, I don't want to spend how much money it would take to replace my entire wooden fence. Don't replace the entire wooden fence. Your gates attached to the house in all likelihood, right? So swap out your gate, put a metal gate in, yeah. So at least if that fence catches on fire, you know, 20 foot away from the house and starts burning like a big fuse towards your house, it hits the metal gate, and it's done. Gotcha so? So

after five feet, what's the what's your next step? So

after five feet, where you have nothing combustible, you're looking at the five to 30 zone, okay? And the five to 30 zone, you want to really, really limit how much vegetation is there. So we all live here for a reason. We like a certain look in Prescott. I mean, we, we just, we love Prescott. I've been here for 45 years. I mean, I love the way my home, my hometown, looks so but we need to manage it. We need to be intelligent what we're doing. So if that fire is coming into my neighborhood, on the ground or even in the canopy, I need to not get to my house. So, mature trees, anything that's over six foot or six inches around, I should say, should be limbed up six feet, so all those lower branches should be limbed up. And I'm talking about a mature tree. Yeah, I see a lot, and I'm sure you have too. I drive through neighborhoods and they have, like, some kind of scraggly oak brush. And the the oak brush is, you know, seven foot tall. And they, they read the manual, the manual says six, limit up six feet. And so you lollipopping it, right? So it's like a big trunk. And like this little Dr Seuss puff at the top. That's not our recommendation, gotcha. So, like, if you want to, so if you want to keep the oak brush, because you've got quail in your neighborhood, and you want to have them, to have a little bit of habitat, find the happy medium, have islands of oak brush that are only, you know, 100 200 square foot in footprint, and and trim it Up. Limit up, and if you can trim up a couple of the lowest branches, so you can get that blower in there and get that leaf litter out of there, because, because, really what you're looking to do is try, if we have a grass fire or some kind of ground fire, we don't want it to get up into the canopy. So you can take that, that oak brush, or even the small junipers, like I've, I have a piece property has got some small junipers. They would look goofy if I trimmed it up six feet. So we just tell them, like, take out the bottom third. Just, just knock off a couple of those bottom branches so you can get out there, clean it up and limit how much of those branches are down close to the ground. Gotcha, so it can't get from the ground up into the brush, up into the high. Canopy. We call that ladder fuels when it's making that transition, of carriage fuels when it makes that transition. And so we want to limit that ability. And so I do want you to have plants in your yard, yeah, but you need to take those little islands I talked about of having brush. They need to be at least 15 foot apart. Canopy break. Okay, canopy breaks. Gotcha. So that's, that's a decent, it's pretty good spread, so, but that's intentional. That's if, if those embers land on this island of brush that we have and it catches on fire, the the likelihood of it propagating to the next one we've we've helped limit that. You know, we're trying to, we're trying to tamp it down. Yeah, so, so, like I said, 15 foot apart islands of brush that are 100 to 200 tops and and limb up the lowest branches on brush, mature trees up to six feet. And you can see, you can drive around town, you can see good examples of this and poor examples of this, and then that's to 30 feet out. Now past 30 feet to 100 feet, or wherever your property line is, follow exactly the same principles, as far as limbing up and trimming back. But the gaps for your islands, they only need to be about six feet. It's, I tell people like, when they're there, they're kind of evaluating that area. I go walk around. If you're walking around with your arms out to your sides, and you're constantly having to pull your arms in branches, you probably should trim those branches back and and you by doing that. If we have a fire that's very distal from your home, and it's moving into your neighborhood, and it's, it's going through the vegetation, as opposed to, like the amber fall out if it's coming through the vegetation. You're now, you've limited how much fuel is available. You've taken some of its oomph out. And now you're at 30 feet, and you've taken even more availability. And now, like I said, that final five feet, if you don't have anything flammable, and you have a well hardened home. That bush that's burning here, it's gonna hit. It's it's gonna the house ain't gonna like it, yeah. But the house, the materials that it is, especially if it's stucco, can and can take that hit you. And I couldn't stand five foot away from that bush while it was on fire. But your house can take that hit, and that's good, unless you

got time to fire department to get there. And it's not like it's controlling, controlling a lot by doing that. And

you bring up, you bring a great, great point. If we're coming into a neighborhood, we have, like, an early wildland fire, something we still feel like we can put personnel in front of, and I have to roll onto a street, and we have six houses, houses that have done mitigations. We know we can get our personnel in there. We can drag a hose line through, because you opened it up. I've got five foot of working space right next to your house, plus you've opened your entire yard up to me, I can get in there and operate whereas, if like say, one of those six houses on that street has done nothing, and it needs 12 hours worth of work. We don't have 12 hours to do anything at home, so we're going to hold our ground on those houses that have done

work. So you're saying that want to take care of the property. Keep it up. Those who get in save it. And the other one's like, Hey, I said, Okay, I have this house. I got, like, one house for I have, I can save a bunch of them, or if

today exactly, it's a triage for sure. These are houses that we we can make a stand at. This is a house that is actually going to put our firefighters Exactly. So you're doing yourself a favor. You're making an opportunity for those firefighters to be able to get in there and

do their job. That's interesting. Not only are you looking to, you know, doing fire wise, to clear your property, to save your property, but also your neighbors, and, most importantly, the life of the fire department. A firefighter, if you keep it clean, everybody wins. I mean, you go to someone's house, the fire out, it's well taken care of, you're going to be more eager to fight someone than someone that's just let it grow.

Well, that homeowner that did something has a vested interest in the survivability of their home, yeah. The person who did nothing to it, if they didn't care, to improve their home against this threat, what's my investment level? Yeah. So I'm going to roll with the people that really cared about their property, and I'm going to do the best I can, because I know I don't have the time to be able to mitigate that house to the level that needs to be mitigated. That's

great. Well, Conrad, that's great. This is a riding of senior escapes. Follow us on Facebook. Click the link below all this information we have if you get to it on how to keep your house safe, property safe, and what we can continue to teach and train.