STAR POWER
“How is it that you want your fire?” Taro Pusina, White Mountain District Ranger, asked a group of twenty-four Starlite neighborhood community members in the Bishop Cerro Coso Community College Meeting room on Wednesday evening.
“Because we’re going to get it,” he continued. “I personally choose to have it – to the best of our ability – on our terms”
The meeting started at 6:00 p.m., when Lisa Cox, Public Affairs Officer for Inyo National Forest, showed a four minute YouTube video titled, “dramatic, heart racing footage as firefighters escape incineration during California Wildfire.”
Staff of the Inyo National Forest called the meeting to discuss the Starlite Fuelbreak project, which was implemented under the authority of the Bishop Creek and Pine Creek Fuels Reduction Project to create a fire buffer on the federal land to protect the community.
Initiation for the project began in the wake of the 1998 Tom Fire, when community members of the Starlite neighborhood reached out to the Inyo National Forest to work on a fuel reduction project to help protect them from wildfire threat.
The project proposal from that outreach conducted work on the northern and southern boundaries of Starlite, while the Starlite Fire Safe Council worked on the east and west boundaries, working as a team towards compliance with the California Homeowners Hazard Abatement Program
In 2013, the program grew beyond the Bishop Creek watershed to also include the Pine Creek watershed, Cox said. By 2016, the project went out for public scoping and in January 2018, The White Mountain Ranger District created a Decision Memo for the project.
The action for Starlite, as listed in that Decision Memo, was to “create defensible space on Federal lands bordering Starlite (where there are structures near the public-private land boundary) for a minimum of 100 feet.”
The agency is now tasked with increasing the pace and scale of their fuels reduction work, and are prioritizing the project, Cox said.
So far, about eight acres on the northern section of the border has been treated and another 45 acres of mowing are planned for around Starlite for this winter and into the next couple seasons.
The west side of the community was not originally included in the plan because it wasn’t bordering any structures, but they’ve morphed the plan a bit to include some portions of the west side. Some of the forest on the west side is sparse enough that work is not necessary.
The east side, portions of the west side, and half of the south side are slated to be treated. The southwestern section of the project has a fence, the adjacent land of which can be solidly mowed.
“It’s worth mentioning that we don’t have any treatment funding this next fiscal year,” said White Bren Townsend, Mountain District Fire Management Officer. “We’ll have firefighters, but we don’t have any money to buy the stuff we need.”
The staff urged the Starlite community to restart the Fire Safe Council.
District 4 Inyo County Supervisor Jennifer Roeser also spoke at the meeting to announce the county had launched the Genasys system, a new emergency alert system that law enforcement uses in case of disaster, to replace the old system, Code Red.
