State Alliance for Firesafe Road Regulations

Action Alerts

SAFRR continually monitors local and state policies, ordinances, legislation and court cases.

Action Alerts keep the website up to date by providing timely and relevant excerpts, with links and additional text for people who want to learn more.

In addition to Action Alerts, the Resources section is continually updated, with links to technical studies, articles, and reports.

Resources

SAFRR’s RESOURCES section is a set of information covering four categories of interrelated and interconnected research, articles and studies:
1) Wildfire Science,
2) Development Challenges – both New and Existing,
3) Evacuation Research, and
4) Public Health and Safety.

Additional detail on subjects covered in the Resources Section is provided at the end of this home page.

Local Advocacy

The standards set in the Fire Safe Regulations are a state minimum—local jurisdictions can write ordinances with stricter standards but not lesser standards. 

Given that established communities and new developments rely on existing access roads, when local jurisdictions exempt public roads from minimum standards, evacuation bottlenecks are inevitable, and lives will be lost.

SAFRR recognizes the escalating impacts of climate driven wildfires and ember storms, and advocates for sound land use policies that are protective of both first responder and public safety. Our advocacy in local jurisdictions spans three interconnected categories and we often face challenges where public safety, climate change, and land use decisions intersect.

• Climate Change - alert systems and fire behavior modeling research

• Land Use Decisions – advocate, fund studies, and challenge in court

• Public Safety - emergency planning and emergency traffic evacuation analyses

State Advocacy

In addition to preserving the Fire Safe Regulations, SAFRR was formed to address fire-related state legislation. SAFRR actively supports legislation and regulations that promote and provide for safe evacuation and protect public safety. SAFRR, and our coalition partners, fully participate in the legislative process.

SAFRR provides a Case Study of the state-wide opposition to SB 610, remarkably successful given the coalitions’ had less than a month before the legislative recess. SB 610, using a gut-and-amend legislative process, would have reshaped California fire policy without adequate hearings or stakeholder engagement.

SAFRR was part of a coalition of over 100 organizations and multiple local jurisdictions that successfully opposed and stopped State Bill (SB 610 Senator Weiner, San Francisco).

SB 610 was suspended in 2024 - for good reason:

• The legislation would have abolished the decades-old State Fire Hazard Severity Zone Maps.

• Staff analysis for the Assembly Committee on Natural Resources identified over 50 unique statutory code sections referencing Fire Hazard Severity Zones (FHSZ) – all would be dispatched at great public cost by this ill-conceived bill.

• The bill conflicted with the recommendations from the Governor’s Strike Force and the California Department of Insurance’s Climate Insurance Working Group.

• And, it would have stripped city and county authority to define fire hazard zones based on jurisdiction-specific scientific information.

Addendum: RESOURCES

This section covers four categories of interrelated and interconnected research, articles and technical studies: 1) Wildfire Science, 2) Development Challenges – New and Existing Development, 3) Evacuation Research, and 4) Public Health and Safety.

Wildfire Science

Wildfire Science is an emerging field as changes in climate and land use patterns amplify catastrophic losses. This considerable body of science is evolving, and there are meaningful science investigations underway.

• SAFRR has assembled technical articles and reports and will continue to enhance such areas as:  

• California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Redbook wildfire activity statistics.

• CalFire State Responsibility Area (SRA) and Local Responsibility Area (LRA) fire hazard severity zone maps and legislation.

• Case Studies and After-Action Reports from Tubbs Fire (2017), Camp Fire (2018), Woolsey Fire (2018), Glass Fire (2020), Lahaina Maui Fire (2023), Los Angeles Fires (2025).

• Fire notification, evacuation, traffic, and temporary refuge areas; effectiveness and stressors of the California fire rescue response systems, including misconceptions about water hydrants in firefighting efforts.

• Modeling of Fire Weather; ember and fire behavior modeling; structure fires and modeling; structure setbacks and arrangement relate to structure-to-structure fires; risk assessment; loss modeling and fire simulations.

• Integrating wildfire spread and evacuations times; fuel-dominated vs wind-dominated fires; risk to communities and structures in the WUI; urban wildland fires; human caused fire ignitions; climate change science; fire policy; wildfires as an ecosystem service.

California’s insurance crisis: wildfire catastrophic models explained by California Department of Insurance; fire mitigations and scaling solutions; fire adapted communities; fire response systems. Extensive research and complied data from academics, public agencies, Insurance Institute of Business and Home Safety (IBHS), CalFire, National Institute of Standards and Technology, among others. And science-backed Cohesive Wildland Management Strategies from seasoned fire professionals.  

Development Challenges - New and Existing Development

Cal Fire has kept statistics on wildfires: acreage burned, structures destroyed, and lives lost since the 1930s. After the 2025 firestorms, the agency released an update to this dataset which highlight the increased risks of Community Burnover. 

• The 2018 Camp Fire, which still is the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in CA, burned forested lands, and its firestorm burned over the Paradise, CA community.

• The 2025 Los Angeles firestorms now rank 2nd and 3rd in the Most Destructive category. 65% of the deadliest were after the year 2000.

• Over 25 percent of California residences are located in or near High and Very High Hazard Severity Zones.

The vast number of existing communities in fire-prone areas merit protection from state and local leadership, including prioritizing community evacuation planning and recognizing the multiple risks to life and property. There is reluctance by some state and local officials to pursue evacuation planning because the findings may interfere with new development plans.

• If a community knows it takes 6 or 10 hours to evacuate, how the addition of a new development might exacerbate these risks merits consideration and full public disclosure.

• Further, emergency management agencies often are disinclined to provide disclosure that, under many likely fire scenarios, the fire may engulf the intended evacuation.

The realities of community burnover, such as in Sonoma Napa and Lake counties, Paradise, Lahaina Hawaii, and Los Angeles will only increase. It is past time to consider the safety of existing communities when adding new development.

• SAFRR has accumulated reports, articles, government best practices, legal references and legal challenge examples:

• Land use reforms needed to ensure safer, sustainable future

• CalFire wildfire statistics; Civil Grand Jury reports; factors associated with structure loss recommendations to reduce wildfire risk to existing and future development; housing arrangement,

• How location and vegetation determine likelihood of loss in wildfire, modeling residential development and integrating wildfire risk

• Summary of State Regional Housing Needs Allotment (RHNA)

• Importance of building construction materials; and the role of defensible space

• California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and wildfire; best practices for analyzing and mitigating wildfire impacts of development project under CEQA; compliance with CEQA and the State Minimum Fire Safe Regulations.

• State laws requiring evacuation planning in existing communities, and

• Local Jurisdiction’s General Plans, zoning code, local Hazard Mitigation Plans; local fire ordinances; and legal challenges throughout California presented by county.

Evacuation Research

Retired Fire Chiefs warn: “There is no such thing as an orderly evacuation.”

Local governments have the resources they need to prepare state-of-the-science evacuation plans for existing communities, as the fire behavior and transportation models exist. The cost of contracting for a set of community evacuation scenarios (using Evacuation Time Estimate ETE methodologies) compares to the cost of installing a traffic light ($80-100K).

What is lacking is the “will” to protect existing communities by disclosing dire evacuation scenarios, where the time needed to evacuate is greater than the lead time- or time of notification to evacuate.

The expected evacuation times during dire scenarios - the time it takes to envelope the community during an evacuation- depends on many factors such as where the fire begins, wind speeds and direction, climate conditions, and structure density.

If the fire starts in another county, there is more lead time, allowing for long evacuations that can save lives. If the fire is adjacent to the communities, which was the case in Sonoma County (Fountain Grove and Coffee Park 2017) and the Los Angeles fires of 2025 (Palisades and Altadena), and other catastrophic Community Burnover fires, the evacuation efforts are thwarted, chaos ensues, and lives are lost.

It is astounding to see that many community groups have taken on funding their own evacuation studies because their local governments are reluctant to do so (e.g. Tahoe Basin ETE by PyroAnalysis, and many ETEs in CA by KLD Associates).

Some jurisdictions have explained concerns with community evacuation plans by claiming “terrorists” could access these plans. Three state laws require key elements of community evacuation planning, and this non-compliance is unconscionable (State laws: AB 747 (2019), SB 99 (2019); and AB 1409 (2021).

Evacuation plans, prepared for project CEQA analyses, often lack any consideration of fire behavior, miss consideration of dire scenarios, are based on “black box” traffic models that significantly underestimate the number and type of evacuating vehicles—these indefensible evacuation plans are clearly prepared to justify new development in high fire prone areas. Serious consideration for the safety of existing communities is long over-due.            

SAFRR’s collection of reports, articles, and studies related to evacuation resources is continually updated:

• Case Study of the 2018 Camp Fire: notification, evacuation, traffic, and temporary refuge areas

• Evacuation options through fire behavior and traffic modeling; integrating wildfire spread and evacuation times to design safe triggers (PERIL model)  

• Evacuation risk-planning tool (Marin County); literature review of the state-of-the-science in wildfire evacuation (Marin Wildfire Preventions Authority); lessons learned from the 2017 North Bay fire siege (Marin County Fire Department)

• Simulating dire wildfire scenarios (Cova); should fire prone communities have a maximum occupancy (Cova)

• WUI fire evacuation and sheltering considerations – assessment, planning and executions (ESCAPE), and

• Validation of ETE methodology used by KLD Associates: Evacuation Time Estimate (ETE) studies from Ashland Oregon, Berkeley CA, Issaquah Washington, Laguna Beach CA, Oakmont Retirement Community Sonoma County CA, Sonoma Valley Sonoma County CA, Santa Barbara County CA, and Tahoe Basin CA NV.
  

Public Health and Safety

Findings from various studies show: “Impacts of wildfire disproportionately affect vulnerable communities with less adaptive capacity to respond to and recover from hazards like wildfire.
Low-income and minority communities, especially Native American, Black, Latinx and Southeast Asian communities, are the most marginalized groups when wildfires occur, in part, because they have fewer resources to have a car to evacuate, buy fire insurance, implement defensible space around their homes, or rebuild, and they have less access to disaster relief during recovery.” (Fothergill and Peak 2004; Morris 2018; Harnett 2018; Davies 2018; Richards 2019). 

SAFRR has gathered public health academic articles, and government studies, and will continue to update these resources that include:

• Significand gaps in research for a growing public health issue; anthropogenic climate change; wildfire and smoke contribute to mortality; wildfire particulate matter; vulnerable communities respond and rebuild.

• Differential respiratory health effects in low-income communities, workers, children, elderly; out of hospital cardiac arrests; environmental health; the sub-peril of wildfire smoke.

• EPA’s research efforts to protect public and environmental health from wildland fire smoke; and potential risks of climate change.

SAFRR’s Website provides links to:

Red Flag Warnings, Air Quality Links and Emergency Alert Links to:

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

• National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

• National Weather Service Red Flag Warnings and Western Region Fire Weather Watch

• National Significant Wildfire Potential Outlooks Decision Support Tool

• AirNow.gov for AQI (Air Quality Index and Forecast) and Particulate Matter (PM) measurements.

• Purple Air and PurpleAirMaps

• Ready for WILDFIRE (Prepare -Prevent)

• firePLANNER – Checklists – Alerts – Fire Tracking

• CALFire Incident Map

• WatchDuty – Real-time Alerts

• NIXLE / Evenbridge Alerts

• National significant wildland fire potential outlook

• County-level Office of Emergency Management (OEM)