Calif. Property Owners Join The Fire-Fight

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ALEX COHEN, host:

This is Day to Day. I'm Alex Cohen.

MADELEINE BRAND, host:

I'm Madeleine Brand. Firefighters in California continue to battle more than 1,000 firefighters - wildfires - I'll get that out. Now, they got some bad news yesterday. In scenic Big Sur, the fire there jumped the fire line and everyone was told to evacuate there. The fires have stretched California's firefighting resources, and so homeowners and business are now turning to private firms to protect their investments. David Gorn reports.

DAVID GORN: In the town of Ukiah, the timber town in the north part of California, fires dot the landscape. And part of that landscape belongs to Mike Jani, president of the Mendocino Redwood Company.

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GORN: Jani's tiny office is now command central for helping coordinate firefighting efforts across 225,000 acres of his company's timber forest.

Mr. MIKE JANI (President, Mendocino Redwood Company): The afternoons get really busy as the fog pulls back and the wind picks up.

GORN: Jani has one wall buried in a dozen or more thick maps where you can see all the fires on his property at a glance.

Mr. JANI: This is - using Google Earth, we can get the lightning strikes, infrared strikes. Then we overlay it across our property so that you can see how many places we had lightning strikes.

GORN: Ninety-one lightning strikes, to be exact, on this property alone. And that sparked 31 fast-moving wildfires. CalFire crews can't possibly get to all the fires here. Jani felt he couldn't just sit back and watch parts of the forest burn. So he hired more than 100 private firefighters who came in from Montana, Idaho and Oregon. Jani even rented a helicopter with one of those big waterbag devices hanging from it.

Mr. JANI: They were flying from the ocean and dipping in the ocean and taking bucket after bucket after bucket and hitting hot spots, as the fire flared up, to keep it contained.

GORN: It was a first for Jani, though he says other timber companies in the nation have done the same thing. But most private homeowners probably can't afford a helicopter, much less a private firefighting crew. That's were Matt Bettencourt(ph) and AIG Insurance Company come in.

Mr. MATT BETTENCOURT (Firebreak Spray Systems): And that's all your property? Is your property line pretty obvious?

Ms. KAREN RHODE (Homeowner, Orinda, California): It goes to the middle of the creek.

Mr. BETTENCOURT: Middle of the creek? And how about up top to the road?

Ms. RHODE: Pretty much fenced.

Mr. BETTENCOURT: OK.

Ms. RHODE: So everyone will have to...

GORN: Bettencourt works for Firebreak Spray Systems, a company that's implementing a new and unique wildlife protection plan in partnership with AIG. He's visiting an AIG insured home in Orinda, one of the affluent zip codes in the San Francisco Bay Area, to evaluate fire danger and possibly spray a fire retardant on the property. Homeowner Karen Rhode (ph) says the smell of smoke in the air is what prompted her to call.

Ms. RHODE: I'll tell you, lately that smoggy, gross - because it's really been, ew. It just makes you - it heightens your awareness to say, oh my gosh, I do live in an area that is susceptible to fires.

GORN: And there are many more of those susceptible areas, as bigger, expensive homes are built in more remote areas, the so-called urban-wildlife interface. AIG Insurance has actually created a wildfire division within its home insurance company. And an AIG spokesman says enrollment in the high end program has doubled since the start of the year. To Caroll Wills of the California Professional Firefighters Union, that's all fine. Good to have a number of companies pitch in and help. Good to have insurance companies act and to have homes fire protected. As long as all of this doesn't get out of hand, he says.

Mr. CAROLL WILLS (California Professional Firefighters): It's simply not practical or desirable or, in our view, safe, to have armies of individual fire departments combing the urban wildlife interface, especially when these cataclysms erupt.

GORN: And it could turn into a logistical nightmare, says Bill Stewart, UC Berkeley professor of forest economics.

Professor BILL STEWART (Forest Economics, University of California, Berkeley): Say you're going to have - you know, the companies will have these maps of, you know, which house you're responsible for or which ones you're not. So you're going to have, basically, private fire districts, local fire districts, state fire districts and the Feds. And you can imagine lots of time spent trying to figure out who's doing what.

GORN: California's struggle with so many fires and limited resources is liable to intensify, Stewart says, as the fire season wears on. And one way or another, he says, there is likely to be more and more private money involved to pay for it. For NPR News, I'm David Gorn.

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