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McGuire’s bill establishing sweeping fire safety standards in high fire risk areas passes Senate committee
The 2020 wildfire season burned more than 4.2 million acres, making it by far the largest in the history of California.
Eight out of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the past 10 years, including the August Complex fire, which burned more than one million acres in the fall of 2020, making it the state’s first “gigafire” – a term for a fire that burns at least one million acres of land.
And in each of these major fires, tens of thousands of Californians ran for their lives, sometimes in the dark of night with just the clothes on their back, scrambling to find any way to escape the roaring flames.
McGuire’s office said the way the state strategically grows its communities has also come into question as the reality of mega fires has set in here in the Golden State.
Development practices in very high fire risk areas must change. If they don’t, more death and destruction will follow, McGuire’s office said.
In fact, the California Attorney General’s Office has already intervened with lawsuits on three development projects in the wildland urban interface because of their wildfire impacts.
“Over the last six years, we have all seen too much destruction and pain caused by this era of mega fires. Wildfires have clearly become a risk to the long-term livelihoods of millions of Californians. We must change the way we build in high fire risk zones, and if certain common sense health and safety requirements can’t be met, we shouldn’t be building at all. The new normal in California is here, and that is why we need SB 12,” Sen. McGuire said.
SB 12 sets up a transformational process for the State Fire Marshal to establish new standards that ensure developments as a whole are designed to withstand wildfire, not just the buildings within those developments.
This legislation states that if developments can’t meet these standards, locals can’t approve them.
And, crucially, these standards are tiered so that the standards get increasingly stronger as developments get larger. Larger developments put more people in the wildland urban interface and so they must meet higher standards than smaller developments.
As of 2010, California had 4.5 million homes in the wildland urban interface; two million of those are at high or extreme risk from wildfire, according to a 2018 analysis by Verisk, a data analytics firm.
Half of the buildings lost over the last decade in wildfires were in the WUI, built under current fire code standards.
McGuire’s office said SB 12 presents a comprehensive approach to ensuring data driven, fire-safe development. This would include providing enhanced ingress and egress routes (mandating primary and secondary access roads) along with mandated public safety vehicle access.
Mandated funding mechanisms for defensible space maintenance and vegetation management is embedded in this legislation along with mandated wildland fire hazard mitigation planning, among other critical policy items.
SB 12 is supported by the American Planning Association California Chapter, California Fire Chiefs and Fire Districts and the Sonoma Land Trust.