The Creation of Home Wildfire Defender

The tragic fires this last January in Los Angeles felt like a tipping point in the public consciousness around wildfire, at least in the Bay Area and other major urban centers in California. Not to minimize the suffering of folks in Paradise or even Sonoma but the magnitude of the destruction was a mind blowing wake up call.

In 2014 we moved from the east coast and bought a Mill Valley artist's funky tree house, nestled among hundred foot redwoods and abutting the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, thousands of acres of wild land. Coyotes, deer and wild turkey would wander through the trees most evenings next to our home. We didn't give a thought to Wildfire. This was a suburb, 20 minutes from San Francisco.

On September 9th, 2020 the sun never rose over our home. The sky that day and the next slipped between dark grey, orange and purple and a foul smokey odor, somewhere between a dying campfire and burning plastic, filled the air for weeks that seemed like months. Three years earlier I had driven through the completely destroyed Coffey Park neighborhood of Santa Rosa, the air thick with that same odor, where only skeletal chimneys stood vigil over the charred remains of hundreds of homes and burnt out pickup trucks and cars lined the streets, their tires melted off into congealed tarry puddles. I had never seen anything like it.​

It didn't take long for wildfire risk to become front of mind. Later that month in 2020, when the August Complex fire, still the largest in California's history, came within 15 miles of our property in Humboldt County the risk became obvious, but that was up in the mountains of Humboldt.​ But this last January 7th, 2025 when fire erupted across Los Angeles, burned out of control for over a month, and destroyed over 16,000 homes it struck me, this is all too real. Our home and the homes of our neighbors are at major risk. I decided it was time to get involved and try to help. So I studied for and received a certification as a Wildfire Mitigation Specialist from the National Fire Prevention Authority and founded Firewall Defense Advisory to help homeowners around Marin and neighboring counties harden their homes against wildfire and reduce their risk of losing everything when the inevitable strikes.