Desert Region Fire Safe receives grant to begin Project Fire Safe: Morongo Basin

The Desert Region Fire Safe has been awarded a special grant from the California Fire Foundation to expand fire prevention and preparedness services in the Morongo Basin.

The funding from the Wildfire Prevention and Preparedness Grant will support Desert Region Fire Safe’s new initiative, Project Fire Safe: Morongo Basin, providing safety tools to some of our area’s most vulnerable households. Seniors, low-income families, renters, mobile home residents, and others living in “High and Very High” wildfire threat zones will benefit from the initiative. 

With the grant, the Desert Region Fire Safe team says they will install free smoke alarms in underserved and high-risk homes; conduct defensible space and home-hardening assessments; offer fire extinguisher demonstrations; provide bilingual fire-safety and evacuation education; and expand digital outreach to more residents. 

I asked Desert Region Fire Safe’s Justin Merino how this grant came about, what areas would be in focus, and what makes those areas high fire risk:

“Since moving into Fire Station 2 and partnering with the CSD and Morongo Valley fire, it’s opened some new opportunities for the community, specifically for grant funding. It’s allowed us to leverage that partnership in our collaboration with the fire department to get grants that we weren’t previously eligible for like the California Fire Foundation grants that we just received…

“This grant serves the Morongo Basin, specifically High and Very High wildfire threat zones and that’s going to be Morongo Valley and Pioneer Town because of the landscape and topography. As we know, when we’re driving on Hwy. 62 or like the Pioneer Town Road, the landscape looks very different. Specifically, it’s what is called the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), where you have more of a green area backing up to where residential and commercial areas are.

Specifically, Morongo Valley has a lot of forested area so there’s lots of green, lots of trees. Then, as you make your way up the Yucca Grade, you start to see that it’s more ‘desert landscape.’ So that’s what makes it a High and Very High wildfire threat compared to where we have open space, let’s say Yucca Valley out to Wonder Valley, where it’s more of a flat desertscape so that is the main difference.” 

For more information, you can visit desertfire.org

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