HomeMy WebLinkAbout6/17/2025 Item 5l, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com>
Sent:Monday, June 16,
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Agenda Comment Item 5l (fire maps)
Dear Council,
It grieves me that the city is blunderbussing into this fiasco cooked up by Sacramento authoritarians, asking few questions
about it, and quickly moving to adopt measures which may harm our city's residents more than help them.
I am particularly amazed nobody's questioning the lunacy of giving Anholm and the other modest neighborhoods south of
Foothill the highest fire danger rating while areas far more hazardous, like upper Highland, where rich people live, get off
with lower ratings and without onerous and intrusive requirements down the road.
I have lived in the North Broad neighborhood for 53 years, and there has been zero wildfire history in that time on the
open land adjacent to the neighborhood. As something of an architectural fire nerd, I think that's likely to continue. And
even if there were to be a fire, the likelihood of its spreading into the neighborhood as the Cal Fire maps suggest is so
remote it's not worth planning for. That's my opinion based on a lot of knowledge and experience.
So I have to ask: why in the world is Anholm (Broad/Chorro) now considered very high danger, and why is the city not
demanding an explanation for this from Cal Fire instead of just being inert?
This high danger designation makes no sense for a number of reasons, including:
1. What kind of fire does Cal Fire believe uniquely affects our neighborhood? Certainly not a forest fire with a superheated
front, because there's no forest, only grassland for miles and miles, clear to the Irish Hills. Certainly not an ember-driven
fire coming from the west (from which direction we don't get fire winds) over miles of grazing grassland lacking the
material to produce inflammatory embers. Certainly not from a grass fire, which doesn't burn hot enough to ignite buildings
outside the grassland area and which can burn up to a wood fence and not ignite it. So what's their theory? Frankly, I can't
imagine one other than some "well the computer told us blah, blah" sort of explanation.
2. Why is this area singled out (and yes, it is being singled out) as a hot spot when areas like north of Highland, which sit
on the wildland-urban interface downwind of prevailing summer winds, adjacent to grassland just as our neighborhood is,
are not in a similar fire danger zone? More inexplicable yet, our neighborhood adjacent to grassland is rated a higher
danger than upper Highland where houses sit within the wild brushy firescape. Why do they have a lower fire danger
rating? And Cal Poly, where there's actual fire history, where directional Santa Lucia fire winds are likely to blow an ember
storm down the canyons (Stenner, Poly and Cuesta) from the national forest -- why does Poly have no rating at all? This
makes no sense. Unless we are to understand this map as a political power diagram rather than a fire danger diagram.
3. Finally, what happens when these maps are finalized and the fire department "implements" them by requiring us to
remove much of our landscaping, cut down trees, replace roofs and historic windows on our old homes, etc.? What
happens when the fire department feels it can muck around in our most private places looking for "violations?" What
happens when it turns out the "safety measures" included in the Sacramento-required mitigation lists aren't even good fire
science, when we discover we've diminished our city's already scant tree cover, ripped out cherished and beautiful
landscaping, spent tons of money on "home improvements" only to find we're less safe than we were before? (This is not
an idle concern: the stuff I read from non-Fire-Industrial Complex sources suggests very strongly the Cal Fire draft
regulations will in fact include items deemed desirable only because bad fire science and bad building science underlie
them.)
What the council is doing sets the stage for a very ugly outcome, and since it seems based on bogus "fire danger facts" at
least for the Anholm/south-of-Foothill area, that will produce in a few years a very ugly and completely unnecessary
community uproar leading to unpredictable political outcomes.
Sincerely,
1
Richard Schmidt
2