Success Stories
Reducing Wildfire Worries
Video Transcript
Alachua County Fire Chief Will May: "Dr. Long is really involved in the establishment of a new program here at UF with the U.S. Forest Service that will be a major study area of the wildland-urban interface areas and about things that can be done to improve protections in that area.
"The interface is where development, new development, actually begins to bump into a wildland area. It does not have to be a forest. It can be grasslands; it could be agriculture, low intensity-use agricultural land, swamplands, or wetlands. Anyway, what you have is all this new development, in a rather dense fashion, is beginning to encroach into large areas that have natural vegetation, a lot of fuel, it can burn under the right conditions.
"I think the first thing is to listen and understand there are things you can do to protect yourself and your home from an approaching wildfire. And then the next thing is to actually go and do those things.
"It involves things like maintaining the thick vegetation some distance from your property, modifying the plants and the trees that you would have in the yard and landscaping. By the types of plants and trees and by how you plant them and maintain them in your yard.
"Business owners and taxpayers have to understand that when we don't take preemptive action to be sure that these fires when they start they don't become raging wildfires. When we don't take those actions then we're going to have to react to them and have to respond with a large number of resources just to try and contain that fire. That's an expense that must be covered by the public, if not this year then next."
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