Page 16 - Sonoma County Gazette December 2017

REBUILD cont’d from page 1
The immediate challenge comes from the rains and coming storms. Sonoma County land protection agencies and organizations are already at work preventing soil erosion and reducing stormwater runoff. They are also looking toward the next fire season and building resiliency for long-term climate change and more extreme weather.
The Role of UGBs and Community Separators
The Tubb’s fire blasted through the wooded hillsides of Fountaingrove, down through the community separator at Larkfield-Wikiup, and into the Coffey Park neighborhood inside the Urban Growth Boundary.
Tragically, the Cloverleaf Ranch in the community separator burned and lost several structures. The long-time Sonoma County family who own it is already planning to rebuild and raising funds with a GoFundMe site. The land next door where a luxury resort is proposed also burned, but who knows what will happen there now. Maybe there is a chance to reconnect it to the summer camp?
While community separators and the UGB didn’t stop the fires, without them the losses may have been worse if sprawl had overtaken the green buffers. We need them more than ever.
Resilient Rebuilding
Of course, the first step in rebuilding is to ensure that homeowners can rebuild as soon as they are ready. We need to support homeowner and neighborhood options to rebuild their houses to contemporary codes or innovate together. At the same time, it makes sense to rebuild in a more fire and climate resilient way wherever possible.
Need for Resilient New Housing
The housing crisis that we had before the firestorm is now exacerbated by the loss of nearly 3,000 homes or about 5 percent of the housing stock in Santa Rosa alone. The City and the County have passed urgency ordinances to provide temporary housing such as RVs and trailers to get people back into their homes. Vacation rentals and farmworker housing are being opened up temporarily for displaced fire survivors. Granny units and junior units are getting streamlined permits and fees waived.
Local experts in renewable energy and green building are already investigating ways to leverage existing and new incentive programs to assist homeowners in rebuilding greener, energy efficient, more fire resistant homes and structures.
The risk of fire in the wildlands-urban interface (WUI) areas such as Fountaingrove is well known. The eerily overlapping maps of the Tubbs Fire and the 1964 Handley Fire are eye-opening. One approach for reducing the number of people living in harm’s way is voluntary alternatives to rebuilding in fire-prone areas such as buy outs or transfer of development rights.
REBUILD cont’d on page 17
REBUILD cont’d on page 17
16 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 12/17