2024-2025 Northstar Community Evacuation Route Fuels Reduction Project

2024-2025 Northstar Community Evacuation Route Fuels Reduction Project

This multi-year project began in 2022 and was set to expire at the end of November of 2023. Added funding has been provided to enhance the project in areas that were unable to be treated from the original funding mechanism. The original roadside forest fuels reduction project funding mechanism was from a 2021 Tahoe Mountain Resorts Foundation Grant Cycle. Current funding is from the Tahoe Truckee Airport District. Both funding mechanisms are driven by private funding. The project has had a focus on various methods of forest fuels reduction designed to enhance a main evacuation route from the updated 2022 Northstar Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Below are key components to the project: 1. To perform forest fuels reduction within an identified major evacuation route to the upper part of the Community of Northstar. The project exists on privately owned, open common space forested land. The project area is a part of Priority Number One in the Northstar Community Wildfire Protection Plan. 2. To remove dead, diseased, dying and pest infected trees that identify as a fire hazard and or are detrimental to forest health. 3. The funding from the grant will help subsidize forest fuels reduction for a primary evacuation route that exists outside the Northstar Community Services District Boundary. The project will treat priority areas that require final treatment or maintenance on 1.5 linear miles of road, 44-acres of land and set up/support a three-hundred-foot (300’) buffer for the road, (150’ each side from centerline). 4. This project exists within a State Regulatory Area (SRA). CAL FIRE has appointed this project area to exist within a “Very High Fire Severity Zone”. The project area holds over-stocked conifer tree stands, declining conifer trees, vegetation health that is a result of multiple years of drought and correcting one hundred plus years of historical timber harvesting practices which altered the forests of the Martis Creek Watershed. Currently, forest fuels that exist along the evacuation route areas require a combination of first entry and maintenance treatment. The goal is to reduce forest fuels within areas that are readily able to burn hot and travel at an accelerated rate across the topography and affect a safe community wide evacuation. A secondary issue is addressing the removal of dead, diseased, dying and pest infected trees will help reduce the acceleration of tree mortality before reaching an epidemic level.

Truckee

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Northern California

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