This story aired in the October 8, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents
If you were here in the Bay Area in 2020, you probably remember that one eerie September day when the sky was a deep, foreboding orange. Some of the smoke that day came from the CZU Lightning Complex Fire in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties.
The fire followed years of intense drought and was fed by thick vegetation in the area’s redwood forest. But another source of fuel was dry brush, dead leaves and tree limbs that surrounded the homes, many of them built on steep, cramped mountain terrain.
Today, we meet a group of locals that is making sure everyone in their community is more resilient to fires.
We're just constantly changing our house. My husband keeps going, ‘why are we doing this?’ And it's like, ‘because if the fire comes, maybe it won't burn our house.' -Tina Castle
On a gorgeous Saturday morning in late August, the trails and beaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains beckon. But instead, a group of volunteers in Boulder Creek are meeting at a home high up in the hills. They don’t know the owner. But one thing they share in common, aside from a zip code, is that all of their homes survived the CZU Lightning Complex fire of 2020. That blaze burned more than 86,000 acres and nearly 1,000 homes. It also killed a 73-year-old man who lived alone.
As everyone arrives, Sherry Heaney meets the woman who owns this wood-clad home, built in the 70s, and introduces her crew of three volunteers – Beth Cole, Emily Morris, and Tina Castle – who collectively form the Brush Busters. Heaney started this all-volunteer program in 2023. The idea came to her while she was training with a local community group teaching people how to fix wildfire hazards around their homes.
The first home they assessed during their training “looked very much like the property we're working on today,” she says, pointing to six inches of dead leaves, branches, and other woody debris stacked up along the home’s perimeter. A lot of those homes, she says, belong to folks who are older or have limited mobility and few financial resources to keep up with yard maintenance.
Heaney realized: “As much as I want to assess homes, I want to help the people that we assess and can't follow through with the recommendations.” Thus, the Brush Busters were born.
And there are a lot of people who can use their help. In the decade ending in 2022, the 65-and-older population in Santa Cruz County grew from the second smallest age group to the second largest. All nine Bay Area counties are aging faster than the national average, while, more people are living in wildfire prone areas. In Marin County, for example, a whopping 88% of homes are in danger, according to research from the SILVIS Lab at the University of Wisconsin.
Neighborly advice
The Brush Busters grab gloves and tools and get to work raking dry needles and oak leaves, clipping back new growth under a redwood tree, and cutting small branches.
Heaney shows me the crew’s progress and explains what she told the homeowner – who didn't want to be interviewed for this story – about ways to make the home safer.
“She had all of that lumber all stacked against her siding. And it's really old and really combustible,” she says, pointing to the stacks of wood now sitting a safer distance from the home. Their goal is to clear all flammable debris to create a five-foot buffer around the house.
Heaney also told the homeowner that she’ll need to replace the mesh covering vents along her foundation – now exposed after debris has been cleared. The holes in the original venter covering are too big and could allow embers from a fire to enter the home’s foundation.
This work is called home hardening. Removing vegetation from the perimeter of the house is called making defensible space. Studies show these measures do work at lowering a home’s risk of burning in a wildfire.
This area hasn’t always been so focused on wildfire prevention. Brush Buster Emily Morris is part of a community response team that talked to first responders a few years before the CZU fire.
“We met with firefighters who told us that fire was not an issue here because of the Redwoods and that they were slow burning trees and that we did not really need to worry about fire,” she says.
Insurers won’t take the risk
Before 2020, this area hadn’t seen a major wildfire in more than 50 years. Volunteer Beth Cole says that’s not the only thing that’s changed. Many Boulder Creek residents are starting to lose their homeowner’s insurance — following a trend seen in other wildfire-prone parts of the state.
While the owners of this house haven’t lost their insurance — at least not yet — many of their neighbors have lost theirs. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of residential insurance policies in Boulder Creek that got dropped grew by 60%. Beth Cole’s policy was one of those.
“Now we're on the CalFair plan, which is about two or three times the price, and really poor coverage,” compared to the policy, she says.
CalFair is a plan that provides fire coverage for homeowners whose private insurers have dropped them due to high risk. CalFair plans are more expensive and only cover fire risk, so residents also need to buy coverage for everything else.
Cole says this puts a huge burden on some residents, especially seniors with limited incomes. “They just simply can't afford homeowner's insurance. And if there's a fire, they're just going to be left hanging,” she says.
Folks on the CalFair plan can get around 15% off of their rates by doing the kind of mitigation work that the Brush Busters are doing today.
The discounts that other insurers give for home hardening are much lower, according to California's former Insurance Commissioner, Dave Jones. Those insurers also don’t account for wildfire mitigation — home hardening and building defensible space — in the models they use to determine whether to even offer insurance, Jones says.
“It's very frustrating for people who are doing everything that the local and state fire officials tell them to do and who are, in fact, helping to reduce the potential risk of loss of their property. And yet, it's having no effect on whether they're going to be renewed insurance or offered insurance,” he says.
These days, Jones directs the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment. And while he’s all for home hardening and defensible space, he says those are bandaids to the real problem behind the insurance crisis: climate change.
“The overall rates are going to go up, and are going up, because the underlying risk driven by climate change is continuing to increase and we're not doing enough fast enough to address climate change,” he says.
That’s true. Climate change has increased the number of wildfires, made the fire season longer, and the fires bigger. So confronting climate change through large-scale policy and other changes is the real fix.
Long-term planning
In the meantime, keeping at-risk residents in these communities safer from future fires is important. It means a lot to the Brush Busters and to the folks they help, such as JV Rudnick.
When I visit him at home in Ben Lomond, a month after the Brush Busters came through, I find the 84-year-old retired radio technician in his garage, on a recumbent exercise bike.
“I do about two to two and a half miles every other day,” he explains.
Rudnick and his wife have lived in their mid-century ranch house for 50 years. He’s courteous and inquisitive, with clear blue eyes and thick light brown hair styled in a low-key pompadour. But he also has a bad back and limited mobility.
He grabs his cane and we make our way slowly to the back yard to survey the Brush Busters’ work from earlier this summer. It’s a deep yard, and you can imagine it choked in brush. He points to areas where the weeds had been waist-high. “And there was lots of loose brush and stuff. They just took it all,” he says.
The fenceline and the area abutting the house are almost completely bare now.
“They just did a wonderful job,” he says, praising Heaney and her crew. “I can't thank her enough.”
But the Bush Busters can’t remove the anxiety of living in areas like this, which are increasingly vulnerable to wildfire.
“When you get the winds come up off the Bay, and [they] come up the mountains … all that fuel is just there,” he says, looking toward a wooded ridgeline.
The Rudnicks weren’t prepared to evacuate in 2020, when the CZU fire threatened their neighborhood. They had to scramble.
“There was a lot of fly ash … it was a lot and heavy smoke,” he recalls. “It was a pretty traumatic experience for my wife and I.”
But, Rudnick says, this is still home.
“It looks like this is where we're going to be anchored forever,” he says.
Staying ahead of the next fire
Back in Boulder Creek with the Brush Busters, Tina Castle tells me that after the CZU fire, some families pulled their anchors.
“They just couldn't deal with the stress,” she says. When I ask how she handles the stress, she gives a pragmatic answer. “Just try to be prepared. We're just constantly changing our house. My husband keeps going, ‘why are we doing this?’ And it's like, ‘because if the fire comes, maybe it won't burn our house.’”
As she and the rest of the crew haul the last of the debris into a trailer before heading out, Heaney tells me there’s more work than they can handle and they can’t accommodate all the requests they get.
The Brush Busters do these cleanups twice a month during spring, summer and fall. Government grants cover their gas costs and yard waste dumping fees. Still, it’s a big time commitment for these volunteers.
“My vision is to inspire others to have their own community group,” Heaney says. “It could be for their own neighborhood or their own, you know, private road, but there needs to be more groups like ours. To get more done.”
If you want to learn more about home hardening and defensible space, CAL FIRE and the California Fire-Safe Council offer resources and information.
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