Bureau of Land Management was on hand as a vendor, at an event tailored for serving Borel Fire survivors, Saturday December 14, at Wallace Middle School campus.
Field Manager Gabe Garcia told the Kern Valley Sun, “Today we’re just providing information on what we’ve done in response to the Borel Fire when it comes to emergency rehab. We’ve cleaned out a bunch of culverts and replaced some culverts, so that when it does rain, the hope is that those will help with the debris flooding.”
Garcia said that the work BLM did was in the Havilah Basin BLM area. BLM has land intermixed within the community of Havilah.
Some of the culverts, in the road system previously available, were under-sized; some were as small as a foot in diameter. Therefore BLM replaced the smaller culverts with increased diameter culverts of three-feet to meet the needs of increased water flow, preventing flooding.
BLM is leaving some of the control lines from the previous fire fighting work; firefighters did, in case of another fire to the area. “Typically they essentially make a line so that when the fire hits that, it runs out of fuel, so it stops the fire from spreading further.”
Garcia said that through good containment, strategically leaving those control lines, that was how they prevented the fire from hitting Bodfish homes.
The area of Havilah had very steep terrain leaving potential for debris flows and flooding. That’s what BLM was working on shoring up short term.
Garcia explained that there were avenues to attain funding so funding was secured for the culverts. And there’s other work they plan on doing in the years to come.
Garcia also said that the last rain event in November, BLM was monitoring the area of Havilah for potential flooding.
