05/31/2026
CIEDM Wildfire Preparedness Campaign @ Arcadia Ecohome for Fire Adapted Communities
By Edward Huang, PhD, AICP, LEED AP
Principal Researcher, California Institute of Environmental Design & Management (CIEDM)
Reforester-Manager, Arcadia Ecohome Microforest
Member, Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network (FAC Net)
According to USDA Forest Service (USFS), more than 70,000 communities and 46 million homes are at risk from wildfire in the wildland urban interface (WUI) areas – where undeveloped wildland/woodland and the built environment meet. Over the last decade, more than 35,000 structures were destroyed by wildfires – an average of 3,500 a year. One smart approach to effective wildfire management in WUI areas is to development fire adapted communities (FAC), and one of the fundamental approaches to build and operate FAC is to engage strategies for wildfire risk reduction. Reducing wildfire risks on a variety of front before a wildfire taken a toll can help WUI communities live with wildfires without or with minimum loss of life or property.
The City of Arcadia, California, is a foothill community of the San Gabriel Mountains, and portions of the city abutting the Angeles National Forest in the Mountains is officially designated as a WUI fire area. As a long-term, concerned and active citizen living in Arcadia, and a member of FAC Net, I’ve developed defensible spaces around the Arcadia Ecohome, my residence, and engaged educational campaigns to raise public awareness of wildfire hazards via online activities and in-person workshops and tours at the Arcadia Ecohome Microforest, an outdoor classroom.
One of these campaigns takes place in every May, a special month for raising awareness of wildfire, especially in California, where the wildfire season typically starts and lasts for about 6 months. In addition, May is calendared with a couple of awareness campaigns for wildfire prevention and preparedness throughout the month, so it is a perfect time for general public and fire protection practitioners alike to take part and promote participation in the following campaigns to raise awareness of wildfire risks and mitigation measures:
• FEMA initiated National Wildfire Awareness Month through the month;
• California Governor proclaimed and Cal Fire promoted Wildfire Preparedness Week in the first full week of May (May 3-10 for 2026), and
• National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) promoted Wildfire Community Preparedness Day on the first Saturday of May (Saturday May 2 for 2026).
We grassroots at CIEDM have supported and taken part in those above-listed regional and national campaigns. As part of local supports to those campaigns in 2026, we are sharing our experience of actions taken throughout May 2025 with the general public and those in the forestry and wildfire management industries who are interested in the subject of community and forest wildfire resilience for fire adapted communities:
• In respond to NFPA’s call for Wildfire Preparedness Day Projects, we registered on May 1st with NFPA a month-long awareness-preparedness project, titled “CIEDM Wildfire Preparedness Actions @ Arcadia Ecohome. With the registration, the Ecohome is marked as a participatory site on the Preparedness Day Project Map, and the interactive map provides a dropdown box with a brief information presenting our participation, as shown in the attached image.
• Participated by our gardeners, starting May 2, 2025, we kicked off firescaping works around the Ecohome building based on defensible space principals. It includes cleanups of flammable materials around the Ecohome building by raking and removing dry leaves and twigs at the Ecohome’s yards and in the adjoining public parkways and sidewalks. In addition, we cleaned off debris on roofs and in eave gutters.
• We engaged online advocacy actions mainly by a grassroots social media campaign to raise public awareness and actions by spreading the messages of the three regional and national campaigns and sharing what we’ve done to raise public awareness and actions. We concluded our project on May 29, 2025, by offered a comment to the FAC Net posting titled “Wildfire Prep Day 2023: All Projects Big and Small”.
The above story reveals our story about we grassroots’ voluntary citizen actions at the Arcadia Ecohome had carried out the CIEDM 2025 Preparedness Day Project as registered with wildfireprepday.org. We have taken part again in the awareness campaign throughout May 2026 with CIEDM educational campaign by, for example, sharing our experience with FAC Net, and will stay to be wildfire ready ourselves and be campaigners for fire adapted communities in WUI fire areas and beyond.
