The Elk Creek Fuel Break, one of the 35 emergency fuel reduction projects prioritized in the Governor’s 2019 Community Wildfire Prevention and Mitigation Report, was completed in part with $325,000 in California Climate Investments funds. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection implemented the project through the Wildfire Prevention Grants Program to protect lives, property, and valuable agricultural resources in the communities of Elk Creek and Stonyford, which are adjacent to the Mendocino National Forest. During the 2020 Butte/Tehama/Glenn Lightning Complex Fire, the Elk Creek Fuel Break helped contain the fire with eight miles of fire line.
In the eight years prior to this project’s implementation, the Elk Creek and Stonyford communities had been impacted by four major, fast‑moving fires. Knowing this, the goal of the project was to slow and stop future fires, to protect communities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the treated areas. When wildfires impacted these communities again in 2020, the Elk Creek Fuel Break allowed for improved access to the road system and slowed the spread of the fire, which made it easier to put the fires out.
Dawn Pedersen, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection forester, described how much the Elk Creek Fuel Break benefited fire suppression efforts in these communities: “This project was strategically placed on the landscape to stop the spread of slow‑moving fires that originate on Federal Responsibility Areas from becoming established on State Responsibility Areas and vice‑versa. The constructed fuel break performed as it was designed. A lightning‑caused fire that originated in the Mendocino National Forest was slowed sufficiently to allow suppression resources to take advantage of the fuel break and secure an anchor point from which to stop the fire from destroying the communities of Elk Creek and Stonyford. In addition, the Stony Gorge Hydroelectric Power Dam and Power Substation, as well as hundreds of acres of valuable grazing lands, were saved from this destructive fire.”