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Plan Your Escape

Emergency Wildfire Survival Checklist

Your first defense against wildfire is to create a Firewise landscape around your home. This can be achieved by removing flammable vegetation and replacing it with fire resistant plants; spacing the plants in your yard, and clearing away dead leaves on your roof and dry brush around your home.

Be sure to remove dead limbs overhanging your roof and any limb within 10 feet of your chimney. Also, remove pine needles, leaves and other debris from the roof of any structure on the property.

Fire Safe Landscaping
You can start with the native vegetation around your home. Many of the plants that grow naturally in your area are highly flammable during the summer, and can actually "fuel" a wildfire, causing it to spread rapidly through your neighborhood. Removing flammable native vegetation and replacing it with low-growing, fire-resistive plants is one of the easiest and most effective ways to create a defensible space.

Rember to properly dispose of all cut vegetation by an approved method. Open burning may require a burning permit. Contact your fire department for local requirements.

You should select landscape vegetation based on fire resistance and ease of maintenance, as well as visual enhancement of your property. In general, fire resistant plants:

• Grow close to the ground;
• Have a low sap or resin content;
• Grow without accumulating dead branches, needles or leaves;
• Are easily maintained and pruned;
• And are drought tolerant in some cases.

Some of the more common species of fire resistant plants are rosemary, African daisy, ice plant and periwinkle. Contact your local nursery to find out which plants are adaptable to the climate in your area. Stay away from unsafe ornamental landscaping plants such as junipers, which may actually increase the fire risk your home faces.

Also remember to vary the height of your landscape plants and give them adequate spacing. The taller your plants are, the wider apart they should be spaced. Avoid planting trees under or near electrical lines, where they may grow into or contact the lines under windy conditions, causing a fire.

If you have heavily-wooded areas on your property, remove some of the trees to decrease the fire hazard and improve growing conditions. Remove dead, weak or diseased trees and trees with an obvious lean, leaving a healthy mixture of older and younger trees. Work with your neighbors to clear common areas between houses, and prune areas of heavy vegetation that are a threat to both.

Stack firewood and scrap wood piles at least 30 feet from any structure, and clear away any flammable vegetation within 10 feet. Many homes have survived as a fire moved past, only to burn later from a wood pile ignited after firefighters moved on to protect other homes.

Clear flammable vegetation for at least 10 feet around liquid progane gas (LPG) tanks. Clear flammable vegetation at least 10 feet from all such tanks.

Remember that after you have established a Fire Safe landscape, you must maintain it regularly.

Adapted from www.firesafecouncil.org