The Butte County Fire Safe Council’s (BCFSC) Chipper Program has been providing wildfire safety vegetation chipping with its no-cost services for more than 20 years. It was the Council’s first program and has been integral in our mission to provide wildfire safety mitigation, education, and recovery.
The program has a diverse design in its ability to assist in fire safety, prevention, and education by encouraging residents to reduce hazardous fuels around homes, roads, and property.
In 2003, we started the Chipper Program in the Concow and Yankee Hill area as a creative response to multiple catastrophic wildfires. The devastating impact that wildfires had in Butte County during the Lightning Complex of 1999, the Concow Fire of 2000, and the Poe fire of 2001 was evidence that structures with thick brush and trees around them were a recipe for disaster. With significant loss of homes, life, and forest cover, BCFSC’s first Executive Director, Brenda Rightmyer, worked with residents to pilot the Chipper Program. By encouraging community members clear defensible space around their homes and providing a way to chip cut material at no cost to landowners, BCFSC offers an effective service which has been used in all of Butte County’s WUI communities for two decades.
Success stories of the program helping save people’s homes were evident in the 2008 Lightning Complex Fire and the 2018 Camp Fire.
-Calli-Jane West of the BCFSC
The program has been a resilience solution by providing an alternative to burning and reducing miles-traveled to the landfill for vegetation disposal. Despite the its funding coming primarily from competitive grants, which often experience delays in funding cycles, the BCFSC has successfully ran the Chipper Program each year since its pilot in 2003. Overall, the council has fulfilled roughly 2,500 service requests for chipping hazardous vegetation around homes and along access roads across the wildfire prone ridge communities of Butte County.
Special appreciation to past and current grant funders of the program including:
As the Chipper Program moves into its 21st year of providing free wildfire safety resources for residents in Butte County we want to hear from you! How has the Chipper Program helped you in your wildfire safety goals?