How Ember Stomp Is Helping Marin Get Fire-Ready, 1 Go Bag at a Time

Children climbed up fire engines, gripped hoses, and fired bursts of water to knock down wooden flames in the windows of small model houses. Local gardening experts offered tips on growing native plants.

I heard someone was lighting things on fire somewhere. And nearby goats lounged in the shade in a pen. Some looked around. Some serenely closed their eyes. I was hoping one of them might like to make a sound into my microphone for a radio story.

“They’re not very personable,” said their human, Bianca Shapiro, project manager at Star Creek Land Stewards, a targeted grazing operation.

Welcome to Ember Stomp, a free festival hosted by the nonprofit Fire Safe Marin, focused on wildfire safety and preparedness. Held at the Marin Civic Center last month — home to the county fair — Ember Stomp felt like a small-town music festival, complete with food trucks and kid-friendly activities. There were no beer gardens or concert stages, but a lively marching band did parade through the crowd.

Dozens of agencies — including all of Marin’s fire departments — joined forces with nonprofits to showcase fire prevention programs and community resources.

Vendors offered fire-resistant building materials, rooftop sprinklers, and landscape design for defensible space. Everyone was eager to share their piece of the wildfire protection puzzle. Organizers estimate about 6,000 people attended.

I came curious: What do you see at a fire-prep festival? What did people who were willing to devote part of a precious Saturday to learning about fire-resistant siding make of it? Should Marin’s model be an example?

Marin’s public outreach around wildfire resilience has grown in recent years, thanks in large part to something unique in California — and possibly the West.

Five years ago, Marin charged a county-wide group of officials with the task of preventing wildfire destruction, organized around a joint powers authority and funded by a voter-approved parcel tax.

This organization, the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, supports Fire Safe Marin and helps drive local preparedness initiatives.

“Marin has found a great way to create a local funding stream that has been a critical innovation, especially in a landscape where we see fluctuations in the availability of state and federal funds,” said Jacy Hyde, executive director for the California Fire Safe Council, during a recent state wildfire task force meeting.

She cited Marin’s group as a model for other counties looking to invest directly in their own wildfire resilience priorities.

While the county’s fire risk is still substantial, the way to start chipping away at that danger is through spurring people to take action. Money invested for safety ahead of time generally pays off richly down the road.

Building go bags and prepping fire-ready homes

Jessamyn Hise, community outreach manager for Fire Safe Marin, greeted people at a table about assembling a “go bag.” What many don’t understand, she said, is that a go bag need not be expensive and likely will not require the purchase of a lot of new stuff. I came away with a printed checklist and renewed mental resolve to check and revamp my own.

I followed the sound of excited squeals to an activity on the edge of the festival. Kids and firefighters aimed water hoses at a small pretend house and knocked down wooden flames in the upper window.

After whoops and cheers for each kid, firefighters then popped the flames back up, pulling a length of rope — the same sort of technology used in old carnival games where players might knock down a duck.

Close to the human kids, the aloof goats from Star Creek Land Stewards gave project manager Shapiro a chance to talk about the case for using adorable grazers to prepare landscapes for fire.

Star Creek manages about 8,000 goats and 3,000 sheep that work around the state to eat grass and brush, leaving the land safer in case a fire breaks out. Shapiro explained that grazing, like all vegetation management techniques, has advantages and drawbacks. Some of the pluses include avoiding chemical herbicides that are used by some land managers to knock back weeds, and avoiding smoke or the risk of a fire escape, as would be present during a prescribed fire.

Shapiro said, crews that use tools to clear plants by hand work well in many places, but noted, “There are lots of zones where goats or sheep just have a much easier time climbing the hill and munching at the same time. The other asset is that sheep and goats, rather than just cutting things and leaving them on the ground, they digest it.”

From there, I scouted out a few vendors. Pacific Gas and Electric offered free manzanita and California laurel plant starters the size of small basketballs, along with advice on landscaping with other utility-friendly plants, whose roots won’t puncture watermains or whose branches won’t grow so tall as to interfere with powerlines.

United Policyholders, a nonprofit helping consumers navigate fire insurance, shared advice, a listening ear and giveaway flashlights, powered by a hand crank instead of batteries.

Perhaps the main attraction of the day was live burn demonstrations, showing the effectiveness of fire-resistant building materials and retrofitting techniques.

In a penned-off area, at the end of the two charmingly named corridors “Home Hardening Way” and “Environmental Alley,” Steve Quarles was setting things on fire.

Quarles, an experienced researcher and expert in how to keep buildings safe from fires, showed how things like fire-resistant soffits perform when fires burn underneath them. A firefighter assisting him piled glowing embers on top of four different types of mesh vents. Depending on the size of the grain, the mesh let burning embers in or kept them out. The best performers are clearly the sixteenth-of-an-inch mesh.

“Embers that can pass through here typically don’t have enough energy to ignite things on the other side,” Quarles said. “Not the case for the quarter-inch and not the case of the half-inch.”

One type of sixteenth-inch mesh is ember-resistant but could let in flames. The state fire marshal approves the other to be flame-resistant, as well.

Up to 90% of home ignitions during fires start from embers sneaking inside the house, not from flames. So, keeping them out was a main message for the day. Hence the name, “Ember Stomp.”

The event is a main focus of Fire Safe Marin’s public education efforts.

Leaving the festival, people carried their giveaways from exhibitors, masks to shield from smoke, buckets to hold evacuation supplies and a couple of big smiles from Peter Kacherginsky and his family.

They live nearby in Lucas Valley and had a fire near them last year. They attended for tips on how to make their home safer.

“I think it was great, very informative,” he said. “We want to do some kind of sprinkler system on the roof – that seemed to have worked in L.A. fires.”

And they’re looking to design their backyard to be ready for fires. He looked down at his two kids with red plastic firefighter helmets on their heads, bouncing up and down.

“The kids loved it also.”