October 2, 2026
Commentary by Ray Scippa, Napa Communities Firewise Foundation
When a major wildfire breaks out, it’s only natural to focus on the response.
We count the number of engines, firefighters, bulldozers and aircraft doing battle with the blaze. When a fire continues to grow despite all those resources, it’s equally natural to wonder: Why can’t they stop it?
The answer starts with understanding something about wildfire itself.
Firefighters can’t control certain conditions in which they fight — like terrain, weather and wildland vegetation. Put dense, dry fuels on a steep slope, add low humidity and wind, and even hundreds of highly trained firefighters can face conditions in which direct attack is difficult or simply too dangerous.
Aircraft can drop water and retardant. Bulldozers can cut fire lines. Crews can attack the edges of a fire. But putting firefighters directly in front of an advancing wildfire can sometimes put their lives at unacceptable risk. Crews may have to fall back to a road, ridgeline, fuel break or other location where they have a better chance of safely taking a stand to stop the fire.
And when multiple large fires are burning across California, firefighting resources are not unlimited. Engines, crews and aircraft may be needed in several places at once.
That’s why perhaps the most important wildfire work takes place before there is a fire to fight. And it’s why wildfire resilience in Napa County has to be about more than firefighting.
For generations, people suppressed fires that once regularly burned through many California landscapes, including fires intentionally used by Native people to manage vegetation and support healthy ecosystems. At the same time, communities expanded deeper into fire-prone areas. In many places, vegetation has grown denser and fuels have accumulated over decades.
We can’t stop intervening now and expect nature to simply reset itself. Instead, it’s our responsibility to manage the landscape we’ve inherited. That doesn’t mean clearing our forests. It means understanding what makes a forest healthy and, in return, resilient to wildfire.
When too many trees compete for limited water, forests become stressed. Drought, disease and insects can contribute to tree mortality, adding more dead material to the landscape. Dense understory vegetation and smaller trees can become “ladder fuels,” providing a pathway for fire to move from the ground into tree canopies, where it can become a crown fire, which is much more difficult to control.
Proactive, thoughtful forest and land management practices change those conditions.
We can see that work underway above Oakville, where a Cal Fire-funded forest health project — the largest forest health grant ever awarded in Napa County — is stewarding steep, heavily vegetated terrain across more than 800 acres in the Mayacamas Mountains. Crews are thinning overcrowded vegetation, reducing ladder fuels and restoring oak woodlands. Nearly 500 acres have already been stewarded. The objective isn’t to clear the hillside. It’s to create a healthier, more resilient landscape and better conditions for firefighters when wildfire returns.
Even projects on this scale cannot guarantee that a wildfire will stop when it reaches the treated areas. Fire doesn’t recognize project boundaries.
But landscapes that have been properly stewarded can change the fire suppression equation and improve the likelihood the forest will survive. Lower flame lengths and reduced fuel continuity can give firefighters more options. A maintained road can provide access or a safer place from which crews can operate. A strategically located fuel break can provide an opportunity to slow an advancing fire. Treatments around important infrastructure can improve the chances of protecting resources a community depends on.
Those advantages can become especially important on the worst fire days, when firefighters have the least margin for error.
That gets to the heart of what resilience really means. We often talk about it in terms of homes saved or structures threatened. Those things matter enormously, but the work has a longer horizon. A healthier forest protects habitat, watersheds and the landscape that defines Napa County. Done correctly, the benefits should last much longer than a single fire season.
We will always need firefighters to confront wildfire. Our responsibility is to give them and the landscape a better fighting chance.
Commentary by Napa Communities Firewise Foundation’s Ray Scippa submitted to Napa Valley Register.