By The Deer Springs Fire Safe Council

You’ve gone out and cleared brush from around your property to create defensible space and now you have a pile of dead vegetation you want to turn into mulch. Who you gonna call?

The Deer Springs Fire Safe Council, that’s who. If you cut it, we’ll chip it.

What will this service cost you? The Deer Springs Fire Safe Council will do it for free; all we ask is that you give us a donation that we’ll use to continue fire safety education in our community.

The state of California has given the council a grant to help reduce the wildfire threat in the Deer Springs Fire Protection District, and the grant helps pay for the chipping program.

Last year the council chipped 157,675 cubic feet of dry brush at 44 properties, enough to fill 58 standard semi-tractor trailers. If you lined those tractor-trailers up, they would stretch more than one-half mile. That’s a lot of brush that could have burned hot and fast if a fire had broken out.

The way the program works is that property owners must cut the vegetation, and the council will provide a fully insured crew and equipment to chip it on site. You don’t have to load and haul it to a central location.

This service is provided to homeowners as a safety measure and is not meant as a low-cost alternative for businesses that want to use the council as a way to cut their costs. That would violate the terms of the grant and jeopardize future grants.

To use this service, the council has several requirements to protect the volunteers, professionals and equipment. You must pile the material in an orderly manner in a place that is accessible for the chipper and its truck. It can’t be far from a road or deep in a canyon at the end of a coyote trail, for example. And council volunteers need to see the pile before we chip it, as there is some material that the chipper and crews can’t handle.

To learn more about the service, please visit our website www.deerspringsfiresafecouncil.com. If you’d like to follow up, email dsfsc1@sbcglobal.net  and a representative of the Fire Safe Council will contact you.

The Deer Springs Fire Safe Council is a 501(c)(3) community service organization and council members who operate the chipping program are volunteers who are not compensated for their time. The council hires a trained, fully insured crew to operate the chipper, to minimize risk to homeowners and volunteers.