KINGS BEACH, Calif. – Chippers and trailers are parked within the Brockway Springs neighborhood, where crews are removing marked trees and overgrown shrubs in an over eight acre fuels reduction project adjacent to Highway 28. The result will not only make the forest more resilient to wildfire, and improve homeowner safety, but the capacity for the highway to serve as an evacuation corridor will also improve.

“When there’s wildfire, embers are going to fly in all directions, meaning that your home isn’t safe just because it’s on lakeshore,” North Tahoe Fire Protection District (NTFPD), Forest Fuels Manager, April Shackelford said, looking at the project hillside, which is located within neighborhoods nestled between N Lake Blvd and the lake.

In just the first week, Shackelford, along with Tahoe Resource Conservation District (TRCD), David Murray, a registered professional forester, and Maggie Oliver, a forestry technician, could already breathe deeper, looking at the progress area where dense brush no longer existed.

Heavy shrubbery, ladder fuels and around 400 trees are destined for removal, replicating a landscape akin to those once tamed by regular fire intervals. “So if we were to get an ignition down here, you’re going to have a typical fire that’s historic for this stand type,” Murray explained. “It’s going to be a low-intensity, slow-moving fire that’s going to burn through the needles and then slowly travel uphill.”

Eight-year homeowner in the neighborhood, John Carlson, who also sits on the neighborhood’s HOA board, expressed that it adds a sense of security. “It’s good to know that professionals have taken a look.”

Carlson regularly passes the ongoing project on his morning walk for coffee and notices progress. “It’s just like night and day. It’s a haircut that the forest needed that [it] hadn’t had.”

The neighborhood’s Brockway Springs Homeowners Association was instrumental in bringing the project to the neighborhood and the direct benefits go beyond homes in the HOA’s purview to adjacent condos, and homes up the hill along the highway.

The project is estimated to benefit well over 100 homes in the area.

“That’s another kind of justifier for when we go to treat somewhere,” Shackelford explained, “I want to put the treatment somewhere where it’s going to be the most beneficial to the most people.”

The benefits don’t stop at the homes. In what was a major push for the project, working with CalTrans, it also add safety to the evacuation corridor of N Lake Blvd. Fuels reduction work along evacuations zones has been a top priority for regional fire leaders.

“We can’t change how many people are in the basin,” Murray said. “We can’t change the infrastructure that transports those people in the basin, but we can change the fuel that surrounds those evacuation corridors.”

The fuels reduction project is implemented in tandem with defensible space inspections in the Brockway Springs neighborhoods. In conducting the inspections and working under Shackelford, Defensible Space Inspector Beto Wetter said, “She taught me that the importance with fighting against fires in Tahoe is [that] it takes a community effort.”

This effort at Brockway Springs, in addition to NTFPD, TRCD, CalTrans and the Brockway Springs HOA, has also involved the Tahoe Fire & Fuels Team and funding from the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act.

The project started Sept. 22 and will run through mid-October. Following the project, the HOA has committed to maintaining the area to preserve the progress.