Why do I look forward to February? It’s not because it’s the month we learn from Punxsutawney Phil if we will have six more weeks of winter or that with 28 days, it’s not because February is the shortest month of the year.

It’s my favorite month because pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training. Yep, that annual tradition when the Grapefruit League and Cactus League teams signal summer is on its way. Let’s go Giants!

The Los Angles fires continue to reverberate in several ways here locally. Here are just a few.

On February 4, I was invited by Senator Josh Becker to join him in Sacramento to present to the Bay Area Council (BAC), a group of approximately 30 legislators from the 9 Bay Area Counties. The objective was to inform them about the work Santa Clara County FireSafe Council has done, our projects and technology practice, and to share my perspective of the statewide Fire Safe Councils’, as I am a board member for the California Fire Safe Council. Included was a discussion on policy, the changes needed that would be most impactful. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for listening. Also presenting that morning was Dave Winnacker, the recently retired Fire Chief of Moraga-Orinda Fire District, and a nationally recognized leader in fire science. He made his own presentation, and if you know Dave, he makes a compelling case on the topics he presents. We both discussed Chapter 7A and Assembly Bill 3074, passed in 2020, requiring Zone Zero as among the most impactful changes to protect homes from burning.

I think our audio leaked because two days later, Governor Newsom issued his Executive Order, that within 45 days, state officials must post a draft of the five-foot rule and hold a public workshop to gather input on it, then produce a final rule by year’s end. Does the BAC, myself and Dave take credit for this….you decide. 😂

See an article in the East Bay Times by Ethan Baron for more about this: Newsom’s executive order mandating 5-foot clearance around homes: What does it mean?



Last week I had the opportunity to speak with intrepid KTXL FOX40 News reporter Juliette Smith about the new CAL FIRE Zone 0 regulations and was joined by fire leaders and friends Dave Winnacker & Frank Bigelow. Watch the interview here: CAL FIRE releases first updated fire hazard severity zone maps in 14 years fox40.com

Continuing on the theme, I am pleased to share that I spoke at Senator Josh Becker's virtual Wildfire Town Hall that happened on February 18^th, where I was joined by my friend, Woodside Fire Protection District Fire Marshal Kimberly Giuliacci to discuss defensible space, home hardening, FireTech and of course, the new Zone 0 regulations. Watch the video here.

You may recall from an earlier newsletter that I had applied to join the UC San Diego Wildfire Science & Technology Commons, a bold new initiative designed to accelerate technological innovations for wildfire management and mitigation. The WSTC is composed of team members from the University of California San Diego, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and affiliate collaborators from federal government, industry, and other collaborators. WSTC is building a community platform around open data, cutting-edge science, AI, and shared knowledge. Pleased to announce that I have been accepted and can now leverage this collaborative for Santa Clara County FireSafe Council, our clients, and make meaningful contributions to accelerate WSTC’s important work. We had our first meeting last week. See the slide deck below.

Earlier this month, we announced the expansion of our AI wildfire smoke sensor network with the sale of additional N5 N5SHIELD™ systems to San Jose Water, focusing on key locations in high-fire risk zones in the Santa Cruz Mountains region. Read the press release here.

I want to thank the California Fire Safe Council for the opportunity to develop a drone video and promotional campaign for our two CAL FIRE Forest Health Grant projects, collectively known as the Los Gatos Creek Watershed Collaborative. This week, we worked with Alex and Mark from the TOPO COLLECTIVE and spent two days in the field filming, cutting video to explain what a forest health project is, how it is different, yet compliments, traditional wildfire mitigation treatments. We also were able to watch from afar as a few different prescribed fire burns were taking place. Good fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains! Thank you, Mike Mathiesen and Stephen Harrington, for being part of this. Below is a photo montage.

Finally, as you may have seen in our press release last week, we have entered into a unique and collaborative, first of its kind partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to predict vegetation most at risk for casting of burning embers, and to incorporate this technology into Santa Clara FireSafe Council’s fuel treatment assessment. This collaboration will provide a critical lens on which vegetation communities and project treatment areas are most at risk for producing dense embers that are likely to ignite a destructive wildfire spreading into the urban interface zones.

VERM, which stands for Vegetation Ember Relative Mass index. It is derived in part from the results reported in this paper: Zhou A, Quarles SL, and Weise DR. 2019. Fire Ember Production from Wildland and Structural Fuels. Final Report to the Joint Fire Science Program for Project 15-1-04-4, 66p.

VERM is a relative index -- The higher the value (in the reddest shades), the more likely that location was of producing relatively large masses of dense burning embers that can travel long distances in high wind wildfire events. 

You can see the area north of Altadena had the highest level of ember transport risk of just about anywhere in the LA Basin. We want to pilot this as a new service in select areas throughout Santa Clara County.

Well, my time is up. What follows includes a variety of research and articles that I want to share with our readers. Our staff is very busy, and the dry weather has helped us make progress on many of our projects. I’ll let the team take over from here and tell you all about those.

Yours truly,



Seth Schalet

CEO, Santa Clara County FireSafe Council