Fuel break project in Northern California hopes to become a model for wildfire prone communities

After years in the making, the Osgood Fuel Break project started Yreka’s first reentry of prescribed burns on this landscape in over a century.

“We’ve been away from fire because it was an ugly monster we couldn’t control. But now we can manage smaller fuel loads so they don’t become catastrophic,” Tristan Allen said, owner of CLT Logging.

Allen and his crew have been working the hills of Yreka the last few years, knocking down dead timber and large, flammable brush to create a 900-acre fuel break.

“This is trying to help the city of Yreka protect itself from the next event. So that there’s not people displaced like in the Palisades Fire, where people lost lives, infrastructure, homes, complete devastation,” Allen said.

The team effort also includes the Klamath National Forest, the Siskiyou Prescribed Burn Association and the Shasta Valley Resource Conservation District.

“This fuel break creates a barrier — a place where there’s just less for the fire to consume. It can slow it down, or even stop it, before it reaches town,” SVRCD’s forestry and fuels project coordinator Anna Parry said.

KDRV-TV ABC 12 Medford