Reference: how to draw your Firewise map
The original map to start from needs to have structure and property line level detail, since the map sent to NFPA has to be granular to the house. The best map to start from is this City of Berkeley GIS Portal map. A cleaner and more accurate map, but with no way to display house numbers, is the Alameda County Assessor’s map.
Below is a detailed process to obtain an electronic map. There is, however, a much faster manual process.
- get rid of the legends by clicking them off
- move to your area of the map
- zoom as high as possible while still being able to see all of your area
- take a screenshot of your area and save it as a PNG file (a PNG file does not lose any resolution details, while a JPG does)
- Open your Google Drive, hopefully in your Firewise folder (you will definitely need one for the application process)
- Select new, but, rather than picking on Doc or Sheet, select more…
- of the new choices that show up, select Drawing
- Name your new Google Drawing
- Insert your PNG image as the background
- Make the map as large as possible using the Zoom feature. When your map is published, it will be smaller and the lines you drew to outline your Firewise boundary will be smooth.
- Select polygonal lines as the drawing tool
- Draw your boundary line, house by house, using the polygonal line feature.
- Screenshot the result, and save it as a JPG
- Use the resulting JPEG as your area map.
Possible errors to avoid
- Do have a single boundary line around your whole area? Do not separately circle different city blocks that are included in your boundary area.
- Do not leave gaps. if there are a few necessary gaps in your area (for instance houses that belong to a neighboring Firewise group) add a text box in the map to explain the omission
- Per the NFPA, even if a property owner is not interested in Firewise, her/his property may be included within the boundary of a neighborhood. It should be included in the boundary of the area if it is needed in order to make the area a single block: don’t leave them out (the NFPA does not like gaps). The person might sell the house and the next owner could appreciate Firewise involvement.
This process is based on Chris Cullander’s detailed process proposal