March 2023 Lunch Program

This month we will be joined by Lisa Worthington, Chief of Vegetation and Wildfire Management at Caltrans, who will discuss Caltrans' push for fire resilient roadways. Caltrans has long practiced vegetation control of weeds and grasses along the edges of state highways to ensure drivers have an unobstructed view of guardrail, signs, barriers and lane striping. In the last several years, however, as climate change has begun to grip California with extreme droughts and disastrous wildfires, Caltrans re-examined its historic vegetation control practices and embarked on a more comprehensive and aggressive fuels reduction strategy to reduce wildfire ignition probability and establish shaded fuel breaks along travel routes it maintains.

Caltrans also is supporting a broader Fire-Resilient Roadways campaign, joining other local, state and federal agencies in Governor Gavin Newsom’s California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. Amid changing climate conditions in the state that help spawn larger, more destructive fires,…