Woodside Fire urges homeowners to harden homes, expand defensible space and use new chipping reservations and alert apps

Woodside Fire Marshal Kim Giuliaci told residents at a Woodside Town Council workshop on Oct. 11 that homeowners must combine home hardening and defensible-space work, sign up for the district’s chipping program and use county and state alert systems to improve chances of surviving a wildfire.

The presentation, delivered to local residents and followed by a session from John Middleman, chair of the town’s emergency committee, laid out recent research on causes of structure loss in wildfires and specific steps the Woodside Fire Protection District and homeowners are taking — and can take — to reduce risk.

Giuliaci said homes burn for three basic reasons — fuel, ignition and weather — and that mitigation focuses on removing or interrupting those pathways. She cited studies by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) showing that measures such as tempered windows, one-eighth-inch vent screens, noncombustible materials near the first 6 inches of a structure and cleared “Zone 0” vegetation often determine whether neighboring houses survive. “There’s no amount of water that is going to put out a fire. Fire is gonna do what it needs to do,” Giuliaci said.

Woodside Fire has several ongoing programs residents were urged to use: a reservation-based chipping program (the district asks homeowners to reserve a pickup to improve routing and to capture cubic-yard chipping data), annual home assessments (about 700–800 completed so far, Giuliaci said), and…