In the past week, Cal Fire has responded to at least four fires here in the Bay Area. KTVU meteorologist mark tamayo shows us how a team of firefighting agencies is hoping to identify the fire prone areas before new fires start. Leaf litter, kneel on the ground finds combustible mulch. A newly assembled wildfire prevention team is strategically roaming north bay neighborhoods. Fire department non-emergency. The Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority is a unified front. A 17 member agencies and is helping communities adapt to the threat of wildfire. If this ignited, it would it would pretty quickly carry up. Tate Thompson is a lead inspector and his team has been growing. 28 inspectors are currently making the rounds. We hit the ground. We have some of our returning inspectors started earlier in April. And so they've already completed over 2000 inspections. And now that we've got the other group in, we'll probably see 800 inspections a week. Last season, we were in the middle of a severe drought and there was alarming concern for a disastrous fire season. While the rainfall last winter erased the drought, the vegetation has since been growing and drying at a rapid rate. This is a leading concern for the fire season at our doorstep. You can hear the energy of that fire burning. Mark Brown is the executive officer of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority and has witnessed extreme fire behavior firsthand. It's the dead and downed material on the forest floor or the dead grass that stands is really the kindling of our fires. It's the dead material that burns. We caught up with this inspection crew in the hills of Green Bay. Their mission is to bolster defensible space, to stop an ordinary fire from turning into a major fire. These visits do not lead to punishing fines. Inspection crews want to document and point out vulnerability. To help homeowners make their property fire safe, this neighborhood shows the good and bad. The property on the right with little to no brush, is prepared for fire season. The adjacent property to the left needs a bit of work. This is a home inspectors are targeting since the occupants were away, our cameras were not allowed on the property and the crew could only do a partial inspection over a 15 minute time span. The team logged potential threats, took numerous pictures and left this notice on the door. A unique access code will lead to their findings in this case, there is a lot of recommended work. There's a lot of grasses and weeds that need to be managed. There's a lot of vegetation that's poorly maintained that we noted and getting up close to the house there was like broom and other things that are on the hillside that need to be maintained and taken out. These preventative measures could pay off when the flourishing vegetation turns into potential fuel for a fire. This is all linked to the flooding rains from last winter. Historically what has happened is that we have a catastrophic fire season following drought busting winters, rainfall totals for the year show this year's amounts skyrocketing past normal levels . The last time we had this much rain was six years ago. Following that act of winter, we saw this the devastating North Bay fires in the fall of 2017. Let's talk about the Tubbs fire. It started as in the grass progressed into brush and timber and then by the time it got into Santa Rosa, it turned into a house to house fire. This brings us back to the importance of the house to house visits. Happening now, crews will continue to ramp up inspections over the summer. Progress is the goal and it is happening. You get some people that are really happy to see you that have actually done work around their house and they want to walk with you and show you everything they did. Okay. So, Mark, joining us here now, we saw those fliers in the story for people to take a notice of. It's very important they do that, really important and really helpful. Right. And, you know, when we were hanging out with the crew that day, the occupants of the home are not not there. But they were there about 15 minutes, as we mentioned. And when they're done, there's a little unique access code here. So they can go onto a website, type in that code and they can get a personalized summary of all their findings. And they just want progress. Isn't that to be immediate, but just one step at a time? Yeah So you talked obviously about how the historic rainfall we got during the winter months. It has caused the vegetation to really grow like crazy. But but are the rains also going to push back the start of the most severe part of the fire season? Yeah, that was kind of like the leading, I guess, motivation for this story because, you know, last year we're talking about drought and how bad the fire season was going to be. And this time around, we're not hearing it so much, but I guess the good news with the rainfall is it sort of lessens the fire season. It's not as long, but but when we get to the peak dryness, the peak heat, August, September, October , November, it could be very dangerous. So you should still be extra aware and extra concerned because it could still, as you heard it could still be a catastrophic season if you
