Business & Community Development
Got Defensible Space?
One of the nicest things about Brighton is that we are centrally located to a lot of things: downtown, the foothills, and several other places that allow us to stay busy without having to drive too far. The other nice thing is that you can live in Brighton and live in a small community with homes fairly close to you, or you can live just outside the city limits and have a few acres of land or more. If this last person is you, you should probably be thinking about defensible space around your home. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has noticed that we haven’t gotten a lot of rain lately. This causes many problems, but the biggest problem for us as a fire department is weed fires.
For those citizens who live in an area where you have a large field around you, you should be cognizant of our currently dry conditions and how that can affect your home. You are probably wondering what defensible space is. Defensible space is the area between your home and an oncoming wildfire where the vegetation has been modified to reduce the wildfire threat and which provides firefighters an opportunity to effectively defend your home. This is often as simple as your own yard.
You might be thinking that since you don’t live in the mountains with huge trees around your home that this information does not apply to you. However, wildfire does not only refer to fires in the mountains. A wildfire can be a fire in an open field, and if your home is in the middle of that field or very near it with nothing in between, you should think about creating defensible space around your home.
The first thing you should think about when planning your defensible space is what an effective size would be for your home. In our area, the percent of slope of the property is typically flat to gently sloping (0-20%) and the type of vegetation is wildland grasses or small shrubbery. An appropriate defensible space, in this scenario, would be 30 feet. (To see a chart on calculating defensible space, go to http://www.iinc.org/pdf/DEFENSIBLE_SPACE_Chart.pdf)
The next thing you should do is remove any dead vegetation within that defensible space. Trim trees and shrubs, removing any dried branches... Read More