The heavy lifting
- Schedule a risk assessment “field trip” or “walk-through” with BFD’s Firewise Liaison (currently Kevin Revilla), and invite all participating neighbors to attend. The purpose of the field trip is to learn how to evaluate a property for home hardening and vegetation management. The liaison conducting the walk-through will write up a report to attach to your application, in addition to your own community risk assessment (see next bullet).
- Conduct a community risk assessment, using the questions required in the application. There is no set way to do this. One way is to create an online survey using Google Forms, and have it upload to a spreadsheet for tallying. Note that because the assessment is reported using percentages, it isn’t necessary to have information from each and every household, just a good sampling is sufficient.
- Create a way for your community to log time and money spent on Firewise activities, using the categories required in the application. Again, there’s no set way to do this, but one way is to create Google Forms (one for unpaid time and another for monetary expenditures) that upload to spreadsheets for tallying. Perform a season’s worth (spring, summer, fall) of Firewise activities, as listed in the application, keeping track of time, money, and cubic yards of vegetation removal.
- Draw up your 3-year plan on the California template, using the results of the community risk assessment (don’t forget to fill out the headers on each page). The 3-year plan is on a calendar year basis, beginning the first calendar year after you file your application (i.e., if you file in November 2024, the 3-year plan begins in 2025).