Save Santa Venetia from fire

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How we can save Santa Venetia from a Sonoma-like fire storm.

The volunteers can be armed with flame beaters and Fire Extinguishers. Every home adjacent  (and close to adjacent) to North San Pedro be supplied with multiple hose valves and multiple hoses ( supplied by the community).  Each volunteer being assigned a station area to monitor and firefight even tho this maybe 400yds east/south of your own home it would prevent fire from getting over North San Pedro to it. Some of these stations would be a good distance west/north of N. San Pedro to catch high flying embers landing west/north of it.  Each person would be armed with fire retardant suit and sophisticated smoke mask and face mask.

Outdoor smoke detectors along the length of North San Pedro attached to

• Public Announcing Loud Speakers that blare "Fire" when smoke levels reach a certain level ( we would need to moderate this for winter fireplace burners and wind from the west/north).
• the Emergency Phone Tree

And/or every person in the community volunteering a 3 hour fire watch night shift ( maybe once a year per person). Two people ( who do not know each other well) would spend their 3 hours ( between sunset and sunrise) watching and roaming the hillside for smoke and phoning each other every hour. (How do you see smoke in the distance at night?)

Note that all of this monitoring would only be necessary when wind velocity exceeds a certain threshold and direction is from the east/south. The fire that destroyed Coffey Park in Santa Rosa was moved by winds of 60mph+ ( tho the fire moved at 4mph). If every able-bodied person had been armed with a good smoke and face mask they could have extinguished the embers flying over the freeway as they landed on their property and on their neighbor's. (They would have needed fire retardant suits). Video from security camera Coffey Park Fire ( Hemlock Court) This looks daunting (they heard pops and explosions) but every ember that can't start a fire goes out.
"Trash cans were full, but the wind picked them up and threw them 20 feet.”
 "An ember floated over and landed in a bush. It didn’t just catch fire, it exploded,"
"Some neighbors tried to take on the blaze with hoses, determined to save their investments. Those efforts seemed futile as the water seemed to evaporate with the heat."

At the end of this video there is a man on his roof with a hose, watering down his roof.  He saved his home and his neighbor's tho he was at the southern end of Coffey Park. Stories from Coffey Park North.

 An Emergency Phone Tree to contact everyone. Should the fire be during working hours an onsite committee determines when everyone needs to be called back from work to man their stations.

Equipment at the ready to remove anything that falls onto a roadway ( with appropriate training). Every year we do a test run of the whole emergency scenario. Will there be enough water pressure to use all our hoses at once? We should find out.
The Fire Department can either join us  (and hopefully take charge) or let us do it ourselves.
 

They saved a Mendocino County community from a hurricane of fire

Redwood Valley was in a tornado of fire. Winds howled. Hillsides glowed.
Rudy Flores opened his eyes early Monday and looked out the window. He was in the midst of the cauldron. An inferno was bearing down on his Pomo Indian tribal neighborhood of about 30 homes.
He ran outside.
“You could hear it roaring,” .
As kids and elders frantically packed into cars, and drove away , Flores and a handful of other young Native American men stayed behind, getting to work saving their community.
They commandeered a water truck and drove it house to house, drenching rooftops. Someone started a backhoe and carved a protective swath where the hillside sloped behind yards.
The men worked through the maelstrom without stopping. By morning, they’d saved all but three houses.

That same blaze, now known as the Redwood Valley Complex fire, has burned 34,000 acres and claimed eight lives. Those deaths occurred just a mile northeast of the Pomo homes.
When grateful tribal members returned to their homes Friday, they declared Flores and the others heroes. “If they weren’t here all of this would be gone,”

The cause of the fire north of Highway 20 is under investigation but like others that burned in the North Bay, it was fanned by extreme winds. Flames spread west from Potter Valley down the hillsides, taking residents by surprise.

Kevin Jennings, a division chief for Ukiah Valley Fire Authority, said strong gusts pushed the fire in several directions, with rough terrain making it difficult to fight.
“There was no fighting it,” Jennings said. “It was like a tornado of a fire.”
The most serious damage was found in the north part of the valley, often along narrow mountain roads, he said.

He and the other men on the reservation had watched as flames raced toward them, down a steep hill. Flores went house to house, turning on spigots and sprinklers, and grabbing garden hoses to spray roofs, trees and bushes. He was helpless as a wave of wind-blown embers fell on his uncle Brian Williams’ house, destroying it. But 27 others were saved.
“We did what we could to save the Reservation,” Flores said. “We stayed and started watering down everything, even ourselves.”
SOURCE PRESS DEMOCRAT PAUL PAYNE  | Friday, October 13, 2017

Coffey Park - Santa Rosa

The winds that drove the fire from north of Calistoga to Santa Rosa are common in Northern California in October. At about 4:30 a.m. on Monday, these so-called Diablo winds reached a peak speed of more than 60 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service. The fire moved at 4 miles per hour.