Join the statewide recognition of the safety responsibilities we share.
If you’re a wildfire safety superstar, Wildfire Preparedness Week—May 4-10—is the perfect opportunity to share your passion and concern with your community.
Each year, Wildfire Preparedness Week has helped everyone get ready for the fact-of-life nature of wildfires in our big and beautiful state. It’s a chance for communities statewide to get into the spirit we work to foster all year long at Be Ready, Butte!.
Wildfire has a broad reach.
Each year, a theme is chosen for Wildfire Preparedness Week, but awareness and action are at the heart of them all. For 2025, the theme is “Building a Fire-Ready Future: Strengthening Our Defenses, Together.” With approximately 25% of California’s population living in high-fire-risk areas—and many more visiting those areas throughout the year—even the most urban Californian can benefit from a working knowledge of wildfire safety.
It’s also important to remember “urban” is a relative term. Greater Los Angeles—what many people probably think of as movie studios, Rodeo Drive, and the downtown car chase scenes from 1970s television—is actually a vegetation-rich area. That point was driven home this past January when fire, paired with strong winds, destroyed thousands of homes and tens of thousands of acres.
There can be positive lessons in tragedy.
Not every story coming out of the California fires has been about devastation. There have been lessons in survival, too, such as the story of the famed Getty Villa Museum. Staffers feared the possible loss of the villa and all its precious artwork in the January fires. But a combination of forward-thinking, double-walled construction, high-tech firefighting equipment, and diligence on the part of Getty staffers combined to save it.
What did those staffers do? Just what we encourage here at Be Ready, Butte! They regularly cleared brush from the grounds of the museum, creating defensible space. While nearby homes were lost to the fire, the inability of flames to make their way to the museum saved a treasured California landmark and an estimated $8 billion in irreplaceable works of art.
Be part of the wildfire solution.
For this year’s “Building a Fire-Ready Future: Strengthening Our Defenses, Together” theme, CAL FIRE focuses on preparing your property, home, and family for wildfire.
- “When it comes to defensible space and home hardening, start from your home and work your way out.” Learn how.
- “When it comes to an emergency, it’s important to have a plan and a go-bag ready for you and your family.” Start here.
Working with your community and neighborhood is also important. Set up a coffee chat about what everyone in your neighborhood is doing to prepare for defensible space inspections. Get together to share tips on home hardening. Apply to become a Firewise community. Pick a daily entry from the Be Ready, Butte! blog and share it online or with your neighborhood WhatsApp group.
In addition to raising awareness of this year’s theme, let’s all commit to making sure our friends and neighbors are taking fire safety seriously. Bring up Be Ready, Butte! in conversation and make sure people know about all the great info we have on the site. Maybe you can even organize a Wildfire Preparedness Week walk around your neighborhood, keeping an eye out for dangerous brush the way those Getty Villa folks did.
A community that creates defensible space together is a community that gives its homes a fighting chance. If some houses on the block have cleared yards and trimmed trees while others don’t, there’s a greater chance of wildfire spreading between properties. Work together during California Wildfire Preparedness Week to protect your neighborhoods!